COVID-19 SAFE Enrollment (COVID SAFE)

University of Pennsylvania

Status: Completed

Conditions: Covid19

Treatments: Behavioral: Opt-out Recruitment Email; Behavioral: Opt-in Recruitment Email

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04506268

843565

Details and patient eligibility

About

In order to safely and effectively reopen businesses and universities across the US, institutions will need to develop approaches to rapidly identify COVID-19 cases and manage their spread while balancing program effectiveness, feasibility, costs, and scalability.

The investigators will evaluate the implementation of a COVID-19 screening program that coordinates several existing systems at the University of Pennsylvania including saliva-based viral testing and test different outreach strategies (opt-in vs opt-out) to improve program enrollment.

Full description

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in close to 10,000,000 reported cases worldwide, including more than 2,000,000 aggregated reported cases and 120,000 deaths in the United States. Initial efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic were aimed at testing symptomatic individuals, implementing stay-in-place orders, and at increasing hospital capacity to meet surge demands. While the US continues to confront the current crisis, we must plan for the future by putting in place tools to enhance our ability to conduct effective screening, containment, and case management.

Widespread COVID-19 testing is needed to safely and effectively reopen schools and businesses across the US. However, currently approved testing options require reagents that are limited in supply, severely hindering scalability. Emerging evidence indicates that saliva testing with the option of at-home sample collection can accurately identify COVID-19 viral infection. Additional diagnostic testing options will continue to increase patient access. Moreover, this approach provides an option for the easy, safe and convenient collection of samples required for testing without traveling to a doctor's office, hospital, or testing site. Collection by the patient also reduces exposure of health care workers to the virus and preserves limited personal protective equipment.

With access to expanded testing, health systems and universities will need to test alternative methods to manage COVID-19 spread while balancing program effectiveness, feasibility, costs, and scalability. Insights from the field of behavioral economics offer promise for designing and sustaining these kinds of policies. Specifically, research has demonstrated that an opt-out framed recruitment strategy compared to a conventional opt-in strategy can improve enrollment and adherence to behavioral interventions.

For these reasons, the investigators propose to evaluate the implementation of a COVID-19 screening program that uses saliva-based testing and to test approaches to improve program enrollment.

Enrollment: 412 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

•University of Pennsylvania staff, faculty, and trainees that have returned to work on campus who have been identified by leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Exclusion criteria

•Participants will not be eligible for the study if they identify any reason they are unable to participate in the study.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Screening

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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412 participants in 2 patient groups

Opt-in Recruitment Email

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will receive a recruitment email that describes the objectives of a new COVID-19 voluntary screening program, and invites them to enroll.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Opt-in Recruitment Email

Opt-out Recruitment Email

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will receive a recruitment email that describes the objectives of a new COVID-19 voluntary screening program, and informs them that they have been conditionally enrolled.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Opt-out Recruitment Email