I'm excited to share some new information about evaluation of text4baby. A small (n=160) survey-based study was done in San Diego with some pretty neat results. There's a great pdf showing it all but it was emailed to me in the text4baby newsletter, instead of posted online, so I can't link to it, boo.
I think my favorite stat is that "63.1% reported that text4baby helped them remember an appointment of immunization that they or their child needed." Missed appointments are a big deal, and this is a pretty direct text->action connection.
I also liked "38.5% ... of participants reported that they called a service or phone number that they received from a text4baby message. These messages range from perinatal and infant care services such as breastfeeding and post-partum support lines, teratogen information, low-cost health services to product safety, poison control, and infant immunization information lines." This kind of integration is a strength of mHealth. You're looking at a phone number on your phone so you just go ahead and dial. Also neat is that this percentage jumped to 58.3% for those participants without health insurance.
The study also looked at cultural and linguistic appropriateness for the Spanish version of text4baby. Oddly, a third of recipients reported incorrect Spanish in the messages. Were they not checked by native speakers? Fortunately, a large majority said that the messages were understandable anyway.
Cool! I was just at their booth at APHA. Seems like some interesting work is being done!
ReplyDeleteAlso... Would love to catch up on happenings since we met! ;)