Evaluation of the Short Message Service Effectiveness in the Screening Invitation Strategy for Breast Cancer (USIMaPI)

Each year in France, breast cancer affects about 48,000 women and is the first cause of cancer death in women with 11,900 deaths estimated. Since 2004, there is a national organized breast cancer screening (OBCS) programme for asymptomatic women aged 50-74 and with a medium-risk. Every two years, the local cancer screening department sends a personalized invitation mail to eligible women to perform a mammogram and a breast clinical examination. One to two reminder mails are sent to women who have not done the screening after an initial invitation. Despite this programme, almost 47% of women in France do not participate to organized breast cancer screening. The Short Message Service (SMS) is an innovative communication tool in the field of health, immediate, reliable delivery, low cost and ecological. The use of SMS could be an innovative, low-cost, personalized and ecological way to support the OBCS invitation strategy. The overall objective of this study is to preserve or even better increase participation in organized breast cancer screening while decreasing the associated costs by including SMS in our screening invitation procedure. Two SMS interventions will be tested which will correspond to different phases of the OBCS invitation procedure. This sequence of interventions leads us to perform three interlinked trials: a trial of superiority for the first phase (intervention 1: sending an SMS a few days before the initial mail invitation), then two non-inferiority trials for the second phase ( two trials=one for each context of phase 1 \_ intervention 2: sending an SMS in place of the first postal reminder).