Promoting Preventive Care via Intention- and Action-Oriented Behavioral Interventions

Project Leads: Jeff Fujimoto & Hengchen Dai

Nudge Unit Team: Jose Arellano, Daniel Croymans, Craig Fox, Richard Leuchter, Andrea Low, Silvia Saccardo, Sitaram Vangala

Collaborator:  Justin Zhang

Collaborating Department/Division: Office of Population Health & Accountable Care (OPHAC), DOM Quality, Office of Health Information and Analytics (OHIA), Information Services and Solutions (ISS)

Project description: Preventive care, such as colorectal cancer screening and blood pressure control, is a cornerstone of primary care. Despite the well-established benefits of preventive care, many patients do not receive preventive care in a timely manner and are said to have open “care gaps.” We developed behaviorally-informed text-messaging interventions to either 

• elevate patients’ intentions to close their care gaps; or 
• reduce the intention-action gap 

We randomized ~10,000 UCLA Health patients each month to receive one of several text messages. 

The primary outcome is patient care gap closure rates. Additionally, engagement with text messages and the MyChart patient portal are also being tracked.