PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Demsash, Addisalem Workie
AU  - Tegegne, Masresha Derese
AU  - Walle, Agmasie Damtew
AU  - Wubante, Sisay Maru
TI  - Understanding barriers of receiving short message service appointment reminders across African regions: a systematic review
AID  - 10.1136/bmjhci-2022-100671
DP  - 2022 Nov 01
TA  - BMJ Health & Care Informatics
PG  - e100671
VI  - 29
IP  - 1
4099  - http://informatics.bmj.com/content/29/1/e100671.short
4100  - http://informatics.bmj.com/content/29/1/e100671.full
SO  - BMJ Health Care Inform2022 Nov 01; 29
AB  - Objective Patients frequently miss their medical appointments. Therefore, short message service (SMS) has been used as a strategy for medical and healthcare service appointment reminders. This systematic review aimed to identify barriers to SMS appointment reminders across African regions.Methods PubMed, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar and Web of Science were used for searching, and hand searching was done. Original studies written in English, conducted in Africa, and published since 1 December 2018, were included. The standard quality assessment checklist was used for the quality appraisal of the included studies. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses flowchart diagram was used for study selection and screening, and any disagreements were resolved via discussions.Results A total of 955 articles were searched, 521 studies were removed due to duplication and 105 studies were assessed for eligibility. Consequently, nine studies met the inclusion criteria. Five out of nine included studies were done by randomised control trials. The barriers that hampered patients, mothers and other parental figures of children when they were notified via SMS of medical and health services were identified. Among the 11 identified barriers, illiteracy, issues of confidentiality, familiarised text messages, inadequate information communication technology infrastructure, being a rural resident and loss of mobile phones occurred in at least two studies.Conclusions SMS is an effective and widely accepted appointment reminder tool. However, it is hampered by numerous barriers. Hence, we gathered summarised information about users’ barriers to SMS-based appointment reminders. Therefore, stakeholders should address existing identified barriers for better Mhealth interventions.PROSPERO registration number CRD42022296559.All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.