Text message incentives increased patient-reported outcomes survey response in emergency care: SWAT findings

Patient-reported outcomes, such as surveys about how people feel and recover after care, are important for understanding what matters most to patients. However, response rates to these surveys are often very low, especially in real clinical settings. This makes it difficult to draw strong conclusions about whether treatments are helping patients. So, researchers and health services need to find ways to improve response rates. This study looked at whether simple text message strategies could encourage more patients to complete follow-up surveys after visiting the ED for low back pain. We conducted a RCT involving 1494 patients in Sydney. After being discharged from the ED, patients were randomly assigned to receive one of the three text message invitations to complete a survey: a standard message, a message offering entry into a prize draw, or a message using prosocial wording (emphasizing how their response could help others). We found that patients who received the prize draw message were more likely to complete the survey. About 24% responded to this message, compared to 17% who received the standard message, an increase of around 7%. We are uncertain whether the prosocial message was effective. These findings suggest that adding a prize draw incentive to a text message-based study invitation can modestly increase survey participation in routine health-care settings. Improving response rates helps ensure that patient perspectives are more accurately represented in research and health-care improvement efforts. Further studies are needed to confirm these results and explore other effective ways to increase participation.

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Publication Details

Journal
Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
Published
2025-12-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2025.112116
Primary Topic
Survey Methodology and Nonresponse
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Text message incentives increased patient-reported outcomes survey response in emergency care: SWAT findings

Jim Basilakis, Elhassan Ahmed, Christopher G. Maher, David Emmerig et al.
Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
Survey Methodology and Nonresponse
article

Text message incentives increased patient-reported outcomes survey response in emergency care: SWAT findings

Jim Basilakis, Elhassan Ahmed, Christopher G. Maher, David Emmerig, Jo Ann Davis, W. McKeown, Ahilan Parameswaran, Chelsea Hall, Peter Squire, Caitlin Jones, Kit Rowe, Jeffrey A. Linder, Adrian C. Traeger, Ian A. Harris, Zoe A Michaleff, A Frost, Richard McNulty, Seema Vyas, Zemin Su, Kayla Gloss, Rachelle Buchbinder, Richard Cracknell, Ian Ferguson, Naren Gunja, Arsalan Hermiz, Raymond F. Morgan, Gustavo C Machado, Michael Meller, Anthony Devaux, Paul M Middleton, Matthew Smith, Louise Cullen, Sweekriti Sharma, Christine Osborne, James L Mallows, Kevin D. Pile, James McAuley, C Hastings, Ewen M. Harrison, Kirsten Howard, Andrew Coggins, Helen Zaouk, Eric Ho, Belinda Burns, Enrico Coiera, Lai Heng Foong, Gemma Altinger, Karen Tambree, Qiang Li, Jenny Morris, Mark Salter, Jeremy Lawrence, S Darby, A. Van Wyk, Trevor Chan, Kelly Bivona, Francisco Moncada, Daryn Mitford, Brendon Shapter, Daniel Van Vorst, David Glastonbury, Ghulam Ali Razaee, Sarah Attree, Leigh Marchetto, Nandini Baroi, Arjuna Anura, Elise Pavey
article en

Abstract

Patient-reported outcomes, such as surveys about how people feel and recover after care, are important for understanding what matters most to patients. However, response rates to these surveys are often very low, especially in real clinical settings. This makes it difficult to draw strong conclusions about whether treatments are helping patients. So, researchers and health services need to find ways to improve response rates. This study looked at whether simple text message strategies could encourage more patients to complete follow-up surveys after visiting the ED for low back pain. We conducted a RCT involving 1494 patients in Sydney. After being discharged from the ED, patients were randomly assigned to receive one of the three text message invitations to complete a survey: a standard message, a message offering entry into a prize draw, or a message using prosocial wording (emphasizing how their response could help others). We found that patients who received the prize draw message were more likely to complete the survey. About 24% responded to this message, compared to 17% who received the standard message, an increase of around 7%. We are uncertain whether the prosocial message was effective. These findings suggest that adding a prize draw incentive to a text message-based study invitation can modestly increase survey participation in routine health-care settings. Improving response rates helps ensure that patient perspectives are more accurately represented in research and health-care improvement efforts. Further studies are needed to confirm these results and explore other effective ways to increase participation.

Journal of Clinical EpidemiologyVol. 191
The George Institute for Global Health (AU), Institute for Musculoskeletal Health (AU), National Health and Medical Research Council (AU)
Openalex Percentile: Top 50%
Survey Methodology and Nonresponse
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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