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Background: Text4baby is the first free-to-end-user national mobile health education program. Since the program’s launch in 2010, over 290,000 individuals have signed up to receive thrice-weekly health education messages about pregnancy and infant health. The messages are timed to the baby’s due date or date of birth and continue throughout baby’s first year of life. As part of routine protocol for text4baby, we send immunization messages during pregnancy and infancy, including seven messages specific to influenza focused on prevention, signs and symptoms, treatment, and vaccination.
Setting: Mobile messaging.
Population: Messages are disseminated to pregnant woman and moms who sign up for the service.
Project Description: In October 2011, text4baby introduced an interactive flu module. The goals of the module were to introduce interactivity into the system, provide additional audience insights around the barriers users face in obtaining flu shots, and determine if text4baby users obtain their flu shots during pregnancy at a higher-than-average rate. Text4baby identified influenza as both a critical health issue as well as an issue that is fairly easy to support through enhanced technology. Additionally, it is an area in which we believe we may be able to show behavior change over time by including pre- and post-survey questions in the SMS system.
Results/Lessons Learned: Text4baby asked 96,070 active text4baby participants if they were planning to get a flu shot and 30.5% responded. Roughly 70% reported that they were either planning to get their shot or had already received it. The responses indicate that SMS surveys may be an effective way to obtain information about health attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge. The fact that we could quickly send back a targeted educational message addressing the specific barrier the user reported reinforces text4baby’s value as a real-time health education service.