Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jul 22, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 24, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
The use of short message service and an online survey to recruit low back pain patients and collect outcomes in the emergency department: Observational study.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Low back pain is a frequent reason for ED presentations with a global prevalence of 4.4%. Despite being common, the number of clinical trials investigating low back pain in the ED is low. Recruitment of patients in EDs can be challenging due to the fast-paced and demanding environment.
Objective:
To describe the recruitment and response rates using a short message service (SMS) and an online survey system supplemented by telephone calls to recruit low back pain patients and collect health outcomes in the emergency department (ED).
Methods:
An automated SMS system was integrated into REDCap and used to collect patient-reported outcomes for an implementation trial. We invited patients with non-serious low back pain who presented to EDs at one, two and four weeks after ED discharge. Patients who did not respond to the initial SMS invitation were sent a reminder SMS or contacted via telephone. Recruitment rate was measured as the proportion of patients who agreed to participate and response rate as the proportion of participants completing the follow-up surveys. Regression analyses were used to explore factors associated with response rates.
Results:
In total, 807 patients with non-serious low back pain were invited and 425 (53%) agreed to participate. The week-1 survey was completed by 416 (51.5%) participants. At week-2, the response rate was 86.5% (360/416) and at week-4 was 84.4% (351/416). Overall, 58.9% of the surveys were completed via SMS/online and 41.1% via telephone. Younger participants and those from less socioeconomically disadvantaged areas were more likely to respond to the survey via the SMS/online system.
Conclusions:
Using an SMS/online survey system supplemented by telephone calls is a viable method to recruit patients with low back pain and collect health outcomes in the ED. This hybrid system could potentially reduce the costs of using traditional recruitment and data collection methods (e.g. face-to-face, telephone calls only).
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