Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Mar 28, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 31, 2018 - Aug 18, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 26, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Effectiveness of a Mobile Prenatal Care App to Reduce In-Person Visits: A Prospective Trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Risk appropriate prenatal care has been asserted as a way for cost effective delivery of prenatal care. A virtual care model for prenatal care has the potential to provide patient-tailored, risk-appropriate prenatal educational content and may facilitate vital sign and weight monitoring between visits. Previous studies have demonstrated safe reduction of frequency of in person prenatal care visits in low risk patients, but have noted a reduction of patient satisfaction.
Objective:
The primary objective of this study is to test the effectiveness of a mobile prenatal care app to facilitate a reduced in-person visit schedule, for low risk pregnancies, while maintaining patient and provider satisfaction.
Methods:
This controlled trial compared a control group receiving usual care to an experimental group receiving usual prenatal care plus a mobile prenatal care app. The experimental group had a planned reduction in the frequency of in-person office visits while the control group had the usual number of visits. The trial was conducted at two diverse outpatient obstetric practices that are part of a single academic center in Washington, DC, USA. Women were eligible for enrollment if they presented to care in the first trimester, were between the ages of 18 and 40, had a confirmed desired pregnancy, were not considered “high-risk,” and had an iOS or Android smartphone that they used regularly. We measured the effectiveness of a virtual care platform for prenatal care via the following measured outcomes: (1) the number of in-person Obstetric (OB) visits during pregnancy; (2) patient satisfaction with prenatal care; (3) and provider satisfaction.
Results:
88 patients were enrolled in the study, 47 in the experimental group and 41 in the control group. For patients in the experimental group, the average number of in-person OB visits during pregnancy was 7.8 and the average number in the control group was 10.2 (P=0.01204). There was no statistical difference in patient satisfaction or provider satisfaction in either group.
Conclusions:
The use of a mobile prenatal care app was associated with reduced in-person visits and without a reduction in patient or provider satisfaction. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02914301
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© 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.