Text reminders about COVID-19 boosters are as effective as free rides, new study finds

Within the first 10 months of availability, COVID-19 vaccines prevented round 235,000 deaths and 1.6 million hospitalizations within the U.S. Nonetheless, by April 2023, 19% of Individuals nonetheless hadn’t acquired their first vaccine dose and 65% hadn’t accomplished all really helpful boosters, resulting in tens of 1000’s of preventable deaths. With annual booster suggestions doubtless, rising booster uptake is crucial to stop future hospitalizations and deaths.

New analysis led by Katy Milkman of the College of Pennsylvania appears to be like on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccination efforts.

“For our megastudy, we teamed up with CVS and we bought rides from Lyft to see if decreasing the friction related to attending to and from a vaccine appointment may make a distinction,” says Milkman, the James G. Dinan Professor at Penn’s Wharton College and co-director of the Habits Change for Good Initiative at Penn, the place this analysis was performed. “And to our shock, there was no added advantage of the free transportation over and above sending a reminder.”

The study, revealed within the journal Nature, concerned a large subject experiment together with 3.66 million CVS pharmacy sufferers who had beforehand acquired their main COVID-19 vaccination collection. Individuals acquired several types of textual content reminders encouraging them to get their really helpful COVID-19 booster, with some additionally being provided free round-trip Lyft rides to their vaccination appointments.

Regardless of excessive expectations from each behavioral science specialists and lay forecasters, the outcomes confirmed that offering free transportation to vaccination websites didn’t increase vaccination charges any greater than merely sending well-designed reminder messages. Milkman and her group discovered that their textual content reminders elevated 30-day COVID-19 booster uptake by 21% on common and had a constructive spillover impact, rising 30-day flu vaccinations by 8%.

The researchers recognized three sorts of reminder messages that had been essentially the most helpful for enhancing vaccination charges: messages encouraging recipients to make a vaccination plan that prompt a selected date, time, and site primarily based on their final vaccination; messages highlighting excessive native COVID-19 transmission charges; and messages despatched on behalf of the affected person’s native pharmacy group.

Milkman says that, if somebody’s final vaccine was on a Tuesday at 3 p.m. at a selected CVS, as an illustration, the subsequent reminder would intently match that point and site underneath the belief that that’s in all probability a handy time and place.

“One other message highlighted excessive an infection charges of their county, and the third message was designed to make it really feel prefer it was coming from their native pharmacy group letting them know there is a vaccine reserved for them,” Milkman says.

The research’s information evaluation confirmed that, whereas all textual content reminders elevated vaccination charges, the messages providing free round-trip Lyft rides to and from vaccination websites didn’t produce any measurable profit over the reminders alone, suggesting that the first barrier to COVID booster vaccination shouldn’t be transportation.

“This sort of science is de facto vital as a result of the federal government invested closely in free-ride applications,” Milkman says. “It is essential to grasp what works and what does not so we will keep away from losing assets and higher handle the issue. Our research contributes to this by displaying that decreasing transportation boundaries shouldn’t be the important thing lever we have to pull proper now.”

Wanting forward, Milkman and her group on the Habits Change for Good Initiative really feel that future analysis ought to discover extra diverse methods for enhancing vaccination charges. As an example, it could possibly be value investigating the worth of cellular vaccination items that deliver vaccines on to communities, particularly in underserved areas.

Moreover, learning extra personalised communication strategies delivered by numerous trusted sources, various incentives, and different behavioral nudges designed to deal with particular boundaries to vaccination may present priceless new insights.

“There’s at all times extra to study what motivates folks and the way we will successfully encourage health-promoting behaviors,” Milkman says.