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What are the best ways to encourage COVID-19 vaccination?
A new working paper shares takeaways from eight large-scale evaluations of behaviorally-informed direct communications intended to increase vaccine uptake.
The paper describes eight OES randomized evaluations that use direct communications to increase uptake for routine vaccinations from 2015 to 2019. A meta-analysis showed an overall effect that is positive but small and not statistically significant, 0.19 percentage points (95% CI [-0.004, 0.394]). The effects imply that these communications are a complement to—not a substitute for—broader vaccination policies and programmatic operations.
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Lessons Learned from OES’ 8 Vaccination Uptake Evaluations
 Figure 1: Summary of OES Evaluations
As shown in Figure 1, the interventions ranged from email, postcard, letter, or social media notifications for potential vaccine recipients, to a more formal report card of a school’s vaccination compliance rate for school administrators, to an intensive change to a hospital’s electronic health record (EHR) clinical reminders for clinicians.
Four key lessons are particularly important in the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination program:
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Interventions: Behaviorally-informed direct communications (letters, emails, etc.) can increase vaccination rates at scale but may have smaller, less reliable effects on vaccination behavior than the published literature suggests.
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Rapid evaluation: Rapid evaluations of vaccination-uptake interventions in real-world contexts at scale are essential for learning what works in specific contexts for populations of interest.
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Randomized evaluation infrastructure: Designing vaccination administration systems to support randomized evaluations can make evidence building easier and cost-effective.
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Cost-effectiveness: Additional evidence is needed to evaluate the cost effectiveness of behaviorally-informed direct communications relative to other interventions.
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Intervention Details from the OES Vaccine Portfolio
The OES team has recently published actual interventions, annotated to highlight behavioral insights, to allow our audiences to interact with our materials for some OES projects. We are calling these “intervention packs.”
In these eight intervention packs, we share more details on each intervention and detail the behavioral insights incorporated with the hopes that agency partners can continue learning from previous efforts. The results from the eight vaccination uptake projects and their corresponding intervention packs are linked on oes.gsa.gov/vaccines/.
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