TY  - JOUR
AU  - Vaisson, Gratianne
AU  - Witteman, Holly O
AU  - Bouck, Zachary
AU  - Bravo, Caroline A
AU  - Desveaux, Laura
AU  - Llovet, Diego
AU  - Presseau, Justin
AU  - Saragosa, Marianne
AU  - Taljaard, Monica
AU  - Umar, Shama
AU  - Grimshaw, Jeremy M
AU  - Tinmouth, Jill
AU  - Ivers, Noah M
PY  - 2018
DA  - 2018/02/16
TI  - Testing Behavior Change Techniques to Encourage Primary Care Physicians to Access Cancer Screening Audit and Feedback Reports: Protocol for a Factorial Randomized Experiment of Email Content
JO  - JMIR Res Protoc
SP  - e11
VL  - 7
IS  - 2
KW  - early detection of cancer
KW  - primary health care
KW  - feedback
KW  - electronic mail
KW  - persuasive communication
KW  - clinical trials as topic
KW  - behavior change techniques
KW  - process evaluation
KW  - implementation science
AB  - Background: Cancer Care Ontario’s Screening Activity Report (SAR) is an online audit and feedback tool designed to help primary care physicians in Ontario, Canada, identify patients who are overdue for cancer screening or have abnormal results requiring follow-up. Use of the SAR is associated with increased screening rates. To encourage SAR use, Cancer Care Ontario sends monthly emails to registered primary care physicians announcing that updated data are available. However, analytics reveal that 50% of email recipients do not open the email and less than 7% click the embedded link to log in to their report. Objective: The goal of the study is to determine whether rewritten emails result in increased log-ins. This manuscript describes how different user- and theory-informed messages intended to improve the impact of the monthly emails will be experimentally tested and how a process evaluation will explore why and how any effects observed were (or were not) achieved. Methods: A user-centered approach was used to rewrite the content of the monthly email, including messages operationalizing 3 behavior change techniques: anticipated regret, material incentive (behavior), and problem solving. A pragmatic, 2x2x2 factorial experiment within a multiphase optimization strategy will test the redesigned emails with an embedded qualitative process evaluation to understand how and why the emails may or may not have worked. Trial outcomes will be ascertained using routinely collected administrative data. Physicians will be recruited for semistructured interviews using convenience and snowball sampling. Results: As of April 2017, 5576 primary care physicians across the province of Ontario, Canada, had voluntarily registered for the SAR, and in so doing, signed up to receive the monthly email updates. From May to August 2017 participants received the redesigned monthly emails with content specific to their allocated experimental condition prompting use of the SAR. We have not yet begun analyses. Conclusions: This study will inform how to communicate effectively with primary care providers by email and identify which behavior change techniques tested are most effective at encouraging engagement with an audit and feedback report. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03124316; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03124316 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6w2MqDWGu) 
SN  - 1929-0748
UR  - https://www.researchprotocols.org/2018/2/e11/
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/resprot.9090
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29453190
DO  - 10.2196/resprot.9090
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/resprot.9090
ER  -