Plymouth Meeting Patient Safety Organization Releases Findings On Home COVID-19 Tests

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA — A consumer safety group has released findings with respect to ease-of-use for a handful of some of the more popular take-home COVID-19 tests.

Plymouth Meeting-based ECRI, which bills itself as the nation's largest nonprofit patient safety organization, evaluated seven COVID-19 rapid antigen self-tests and released their recommendations to the public last week.

The following seven at-home tests were evaluated: On/Go, CareStart, Flowflex, QuickVue, BinaxNOW, InteliSwab and BD Veritor.

The group says it analyzed the seven popular rapid tests based on the System Usability Scale, which rates products on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the easiest to use.

"Our evaluation shows that some rapid tests are much easier to use than others," Marcus Schabacker, president and CEO of ECRI, said in a statement. "If given options, consumers should choose tests that are the easiest to use because when a test is difficult for a consumer to use, it may lead to an inaccurate result."

The rests were rated as follows:

On/Go: Very Good (82.9)

CareStart: Very Good (80.8)

Flowflex: Very Good (79.5)

QuickVue: Good (75.6)

BinaxNOW: Good (73.3)

InteliSwab: Good (73.3)

BD Veritor: Okay (51.8)

ECRI says that some of the rests require very fine motor control or have instructions with very small font size that could make test taking difficult for older consumers or those with complex health conditions.

Schabacker said given supply and demand issues, consumers may not always be able to obtain the test of their choice and might simply have to rely on what's available on the market at any given moment, but if given the option, they should choose one of the tests that are easier to use to help ensure a more accurate test result.

The full ECRI usability study can be found here.