At a glance
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Expanding and Scaling Two-way Texting to Reduce Unnecessary Follow-Up and Improve Adverse Event Identification Among Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision (VMMC) Clients in the Republic of South Africa
In Brief
A clinical study evaluating Text-based VMMC follow-up for Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision. Completed, enrolled 1,093 participants across 9 sites.
Detailed Summary
Voluntary medical male circumcision (alternatively abbreviated in the literature as VMMC or MC) is a critical HIV prevention intervention with global support for expansion across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). MC is safe: routine programs in SSA report adverse event (AE) rates well under 2%. Nevertheless, global MC guidelines require one or more follow-up visits within 14 days for AE detection. Our prior research in Zimbabwe employed two-way texting (2wT) between patients and providers to focus follow-up on men with potential AEs, allowing men healing without complication to opt-out of routine post-operative visits. 2wT safely reduced client visits by 85%, suggesting that 2wT can make MC services dramatically more efficient while maintaining safety. In the Republic of South Africa (RSA), high-volume urban clinics, remote service delivery, and low AE identification threaten quality at scale. Across more than 500,000 annual MCs performed, up to 1 million multi-stage, unnecessary MC reviews are likely conducted. RSA pressure for MC expansion and severe health system constraints, combined with good cell coverage, suggest 2wT's impact would be significant for MC care quality and efficiency, especially in rural areas. A randomized control trial (RCT) will rigorously evaluate how 2wT improves AE ascertainment and follow-up efficiency in urban and rural clinics. We aim to conduct an RCT to determine how 2wT increases AE ascertainment while reducing workload in the RSA implementation context. While the overall protocol covers multiple components over a 5-year study, this registration is specific to the RCT, aim 1.
Study Details
Timeline
Interventions
2wT clients will receive automated daily texts from days 1-13. If a 2wT VMMC client responds that he suspects an AE, a VMMC nurse will exchange modifiable, scripted texts with clients to determine symptoms, frequency, and severity. Then, if deemed necessary, the client will be asked to return to clinic the following day or earlier. If 2wT patients do not respond to texts or return for any visit by day 14, they will be traced by SMS, phone or home visit. All study participants will be asked to come to the clinic for study-specific, Day 14 follow-up to review healing and verify adverse event reporting. At Day 21, we will implement a brief text-based survey with 2wT clients to ascertain complete healing, providing stronger inferences at study completion.