SCALE-UP Utah II: Community-Academic Partnership to Address COVID-19 Conversational Agent Study

Summary

The long-term objective of SCALE-UP II is to increase the reach, uptake, and sustainability of COVID-19 testing among underserved populations. Through RADx-UP Phase I funding (SCALE-UP Utah), the team has established population health management (PHM) interventions that have been used since Feb 2021 to increase the uptake of COVID-19 testing and vaccination among community health center patients.

Interventions are based on a PHM approach that uses widely available technology (i.e. cell phones and text messaging). SCALE-UP II will both build on SCALE-UP Utah PHM interventions and investigate novel resource conservation approaches (i.e., Request-Patient Navigation vs. No Patient Navigation and text messaging vs. conversational agent).

SCALE-UP II builds on long standing partnerships among the University of Utah Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UofU CTSI), Association for Utah Community Health (AUCH), CHCs, and the Utah Department of Health(UDOH). CTSI and SCALE-UP II investigators are leading several COVID-19 initiatives that drive public health response and state government policies in Utah. Thus, the UofU team is uniquely positioned to lead this project.

Conditions

• COVID-19

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Text-Messaging (TM)

Participants in the TM condition will receive HIPAA-compliant bidirectional text messages. These texts will include a brief message alerting patients that they are eligible to receive a test kit and asking participants if they would like to receive a test kit. Participants who reply "yes" will receive an additional message with information about how to receive a test kit.

BEHAVIORAL

Conversational Agent (CA)

Patients in the CA condition will receive a link to an automated, scripted and interactive conversational agent used to mimic human interaction to: 1) elicit specific hesitancy factors and barriers to testing; 2) provide tailored information to address each individual's hesitancy factors and barriers to testing; and 3) offer access to at-home rapid test kits.

BEHAVIORAL

Patient Navigation (PN)

Participants in the PN condition will receive a call from a Community Health Worker to assist with the process of receiving a COVID test. At this time the participant has the option to opt-out of this follow up phone call. The patient navigation from the Community Health Worker includes practical advice in addressing barriers to testing such as logistics, as well as fear, skepticism, and hesitancy. There are two distinct different types of patient navigation. A person can be randomly assigned to either type, or no PN, or a combination of the two types.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Utah Department of Health

  collaborator OTHER

• Association for Utah Community Health

  collaborator OTHER

• National Institutes of Health (NIH)

  collaborator NIH

• National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)

  collaborator NIH

• University of Utah

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Guilherme Del Fiol, MD PhD · University of Utah

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SCREENING

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-01-15

Primary Completion

2023-11-30

Completion

2023-11-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations