A mixed methods study evaluating acceptability of a daily COVID-19 testing regimen with a mobile-app connected, at-home, rapid antigen test: Implications for current and future pandemics.

BACKGROUND: Widespread use of at-home rapid COVID-19 antigen tests has been proposed as an important public health intervention to interrupt chains of transmission. Antigen tests may be preferred over PCR because they provide on-demand results for relatively low cost and can identify people when they are most likely to be infectious, particularly when used daily. Yet the extent to which a frequent antigen testing intervention will result in a positive public health impact for COVID-19 will depend on high acceptability and high adherence to such regimens. METHODS: We conducted a mixed-methods study assessing acceptability of and adherence to a daily at-home mobile-app connected rapid antigen testing regimen among employees of a US-based media company. Acceptability was assessed across seven domains of the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability. RESULTS: Among 31 study participants, acceptability of the daily testing intervention was generally high, with participants reporting high perceived effectiveness, intervention coherence, and self-efficacy; positive affective attitude; acceptable degree of burden and opportunity cost; and assessing the intervention as ethical. 71% reported a preference to test daily using an at-home antigen test than weekly employment-based PCR. Mean adherence to the 21-day testing regimen was 88% with 43% of participants achieving 100% adherence, 48% testing at least every other day, and 10% testing less than every other day. CONCLUSIONS: Despite overall high acceptability and adherence, we identified three implementation challenges that must be addressed for frequent serial testing for COVID-19 to be implemented at scale and have a positive public health impact. First, users need guidance on how and when to adapt testing frequencies to different epidemiological conditions. Second, users and institutions need guidelines for how to safely store and share test results. Third, implementation of serial testing strategies must prioritize health equity and protect those most vulnerable to COVID-19.

When to re-order laboratory tests? Learning laboratory test shelf-life.

Most laboratory results are valid for only a certain time period (laboratory tests shelf-life), after which they are outdated and the test needs to be re-administered. Currently, laboratory test shelf-lives are not centrally available anywhere but the implicit knowledge of doctors. In this work we propose an automated method to learn laboratory test-specific shelf-life by identifying prevalent laboratory test order patterns in electronic health records. The resulting shelf-lives performed well in the evaluation of internal validity, clinical interpretability, and external validity.

Can Patient Record Summarization Support Quality Metric Abstraction?

We present a pre/post intervention study, where HARVEST, a general-purpose patient record summarization tool, was introduced to ten data abstraction specialists. The specialists are responsible for reviewing hundreds of patient charts each month and reporting disease-specific quality metrics to a variety of online registries and databases. We qualitatively and quantitatively investigated whether HARVEST improved the process of quality metric abstraction. Study instruments included pre/post questionnaires and log analyses of the specialists' actions in the electronic health record (EHR). The specialists reported favorable impressions of HARVEST and suggested that it was most useful when abstracting metrics from patients with long hospitalizations and for metrics that were not consistently captured in a structured manner in the EHR. A statistically significant reduction in time spent per chart before and after use of HARVEST was observed for 50% of the specialists and 90% of the specialists continue to use HARVEST after the study period.