All at-home COVID-19 tests are different, says a new ECRI report.

Patient Safety and Cost Nonprofit Assessment of Seven Antigens test Available in pharmacies and online for convenience, this determines the accuracy of the results.

“If at-home testing is complicated, if it’s cumbersome, it can significantly increase the error rate, which is certainly a concern,” said ECRI President and CEO Marcus Schabacker. “If you confuse how to test, you can get a false A positive or, more importantly, a false negative test, and then you have a level of comfort that you probably shouldn’t have.”

The findings are especially important as the spread of COVID and its variants has led to another surge that has put pressure on the healthcare system. Allowing patients to self-test and resulting in inaccurate results could further affect the course of the pandemic.

The On/Go, CareStart, Flowflex test kits were rated “Very Good” for a variety of reasons, including clearly printed instructions, cases that offer less opportunity to interfere with test strip results, and useful applications. QuickVue, BinaxNOW, and InteliSwab were rated intermediate “good,” but there were some usability challenges for some users with impaired vision or poor motor control.

BD Veritor came in at the bottom with a “barely acceptable” rating, mainly because users had to rely on the phone app that came with the test for instructions and results, which ECRI said was time-consuming and potentially problematic for people with motor skills impairments. challenge.

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It’s also important to note that none of the seven tests have instructions in a language other than English or Spanish, which is an important factor when considering health equity, Shabak said.

In a statement to Modern Healthcare, BD said it invested significant time and resources in developing the BD Veritor test through focus groups and usability studies. Using smartphone technology in the tests was actually an advantage, the company said.

“BD is the only at-home COVID-19 test that uses a smartphone camera and mobile app to interpret and provide a clear ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ numerical display of the results, eliminating the human subjectivity of visual reading testing,” BD spokesperson Brooke Houston wrote. “We look forward to further reviewing the feedback from volunteers who participated in the ECRI analysis to determine how we can further improve availability and thus improve customer satisfaction with our at-home testing.”

A usability test was conducted in December 2021 by 12 engineers (mainly composed of engineers and scientists) at ECRI headquarters.

This first In December 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter at-home testing in the U.S. Nearly a year later, President Joe Biden announced that the federal government would Buy Rapid home tests are distributed to those who request through government websites. The website will launch after test manufacturers deliver products through increased manufacturing capacity. From January 15, private insurers will also be required to pay for home testing through a reimbursement process.