Patient reminder and recall interventions to improve immunization rates
Citation: Jacobson Vann JC, Jacobson RM, Coyne‐Beasley T, et al. Patient reminder and recall interventions to improve immunization rates. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2018;(1):CD003941.
What is this? COVID-19 vaccines are becoming available and existing research on how to improve the uptake of vaccination might be useful for policy makers.
In this Cochrane review, the authors searched for comparative effectiveness studies of patient reminder and recall interventions to improve uptake of immunizations. They restricted their searches to articles published in English and did the search in January 2017. They included 75 studies from ten countries.
A COVID-19 Global Evaluation Coalition brief that uses evidence from this review is available here[http://www.covid19-evaluation-coalition.org/documents/VACCINES-Brief-2.pdf]
What works: Patient reminder or recall interventions, including telephone and auto-dialer calls, letters, postcards, text messages, combination of mail or telephone, or a combination of patient reminder or recall with outreach, probably improve the proportion of participants who receive immunization.
Single‐method reminders which improve uptake of immunizations are postcards, text messages and auto-dialer messages; while telephone calls and letters to patients are probably effective.
What doesn’t work: Nothing noted.
What’s uncertain: The effects of using reminder or recall messages via secure digital online patient portal systems are uncertain.