Intervention strategies for improving patient adherence to follow-up in the era of mobile information technology: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Haotian Lin, Xiaohang Wu, Haotian Lin, Xiaohang Wu

Abstract

Background: Patient adherence to follow-up plays a key role in the medical surveillance of chronic diseases and affects the implementation of clinical research by influencing cost and validity. We previously reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) on short message service (SMS) reminders, which significantly improved follow-up adherence in pediatric cataract treatment.

Methods: RCTs published in English that reported the impact of SMS or telephone reminders on increasing or decreasing the follow-up rate (FUR) were selected from Medline, EMBASE, PubMed, and the Cochrane Library through February 2014. The impacts of SMS and telephone reminders on the FUR of patients were systematically evaluated by meta-analysis and bias was assessed.

Results: We identified 13 RCTs reporting on 3276 patients with and 3402 patients without SMS reminders and 8 RCTs reporting on 2666 patients with and 3439 patients without telephone reminders. For the SMS reminders, the majority of the studies (>50%) were at low risk of bias, considering adequate sequence generation, allocation concealment, blinding, evaluation of incomplete outcome data, and lack of selective reporting. For the studies on the telephone reminders, only the evaluation of incomplete outcome data accounted for more than 50% of studies being at low risk of bias. The pooled odds ratio (OR) for the improvement of follow-up adherence in the SMS group compared with the control group was 1.76 (95% CI [1.37, 2.26]; P<0.01), and the pooled OR for the improvement of follow-up adherence in the telephone group compared with the control group was 2.09 (95% CI [1.85, 2.36]; P<0.01); both sets showed no evidence of publication bias.

Conclusions: SMS and telephone reminders could both significantly improve the FUR. Telephone reminders were more effective but had a higher risk of bias than SMS reminders.

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Co-author Haotian Lin is a PLOS ONE Editorial Board member. This does not alter the authors adherence to PLOS ONE Editorial policies and criteria.

Figures

Figure 1. Flowchart of the included and…
Figure 1. Flowchart of the included and excluded studies.
Figure 2. Risk-of-bias graphs.
Figure 2. Risk-of-bias graphs.
Panel A, evaluation of the study quality of RCTs on SMS reminders; Panel B, evaluation of the study quality of RCTs on telephone reminders. The green bar means reported and a low risk of bias, the yellow bar means unreported and a moderate risk of bias, and the red bar means unreported and a high risk of bias.
Figure 3. Comparison of the FUR between…
Figure 3. Comparison of the FUR between the SMS and the control groups.
Figure 4. Comparison of the FUR between…
Figure 4. Comparison of the FUR between the telephone and the control groups.
Figure 5. Funnel plots for publication bias…
Figure 5. Funnel plots for publication bias testing.
Panel A, SMS reminder effect; Panel B, telephone reminder effect. Each point represents a separate study on the indicated association. The vertical line represents the mean effect size. Generally, the points are distributed symmetrically as an inverted funnel, indicating minor publication bias.

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