Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Previously submitted to: JMIR mHealth and uHealth (no longer under consideration since Sep 14, 2021)

Date Submitted: Jul 20, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 20, 2021 - Sep 14, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint

Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).

Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.

Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).

Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.

Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.

Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.

Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

Utility and acceptability of text messages for PMTCT: a qualitative assessment of user experiences

  • Melinda Brown; 
  • May Maloba; 
  • Catherine Wexler; 
  • Natabhona Mabachi; 
  • Sharon Koech; 
  • Silas Lagat; 
  • Yvonne Kamau; 
  • Kathy Goggin; 
  • Brad Gautney; 
  • Sarah Finocchario-Kessler

ABSTRACT

Background:

Evidence that text messages can support patient adherence to HIV care is growing. We conducted a pilot study of the HIV Infant Tracking System (HITSystem 2.0), an intervention that includes SMS to patients to support maternal medication adherence, appointment attendance, and hospital-based deliveries during the antenatal period.

Objective:

The objective of this study was to qualitatively assess women’s experiences receiving SMS to understand message utility and acceptability with the goal of refining and strengthening the intervention.

Methods:

As part of an intervention development pilot study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 33 women living with HIV who received SMS through the HITSystem 2.0 throughout their pregnancy and postpartum period. Interview questions assessed women’s feedback of the SMS, the impact of the SMS on their PMTCT care, and suggestions for improvement.

Results:

Participants described how SMS reinforced existing strategies for medication adherence and served as cues to action for antenatal appointments and hospital-based deliveries. SMS also provided encouragement and enhanced their sense of engagement with their clinical care team. Given the neutral content of the messages, most women reported no concerns about message confidentiality. Recommendations to enhance utility included greater customizability (timing and frequency of messages) and a few women suggested more comprehensive counseling regarding the SMS content to anticipate at the time of enrollment.

Conclusions:

SMS content was deemed useful and acceptable by pregnant and postpartum women living with HIV and engaged in PMTCT services. Participant recommendations to increase message customization options have been adopted to enhance the intervention. Clinical Trial: Trial registration: clinicaltrials.gov, NCT02726607. Registered 01 April 2016. Retrospectively registered. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02726607


 Citation

Please cite as:

Brown M, Maloba M, Wexler C, Mabachi N, Koech S, Lagat S, Kamau Y, Goggin K, Gautney B, Finocchario-Kessler S

Utility and acceptability of text messages for PMTCT: a qualitative assessment of user experiences

JMIR Preprints. 20/07/2021:32272

DOI: 10.2196/preprints.32272

URL: https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/32272

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.