Text4baby is a free mobile service that provides pregnant women and new mothers with maternal, fetal and newborn health information via text messages in San Diego.
Text4baby is a free mobile service that provides pregnant women and new mothers with maternal, fetal and newborn health information via text messages in San Diego. The service also connects them to national health resources. The impact of this service was recently presented at the American Public Health Association Conference in Washington D.C. by researchers at UC San Diego Health System's Department of Reproductive Medicine and the National Latino Research Center (NLRC) at Cal State San Marcos University.
The study, funded by the Alliance Healthcare Foundation, took place with text4baby users in San Diego County and included interviews with 38 women and a phone survey with 122 users.
"Initial research indicates text4baby is increasing users' health knowledge, facilitating interaction with health providers, improving adherence to appointments and immunizations and strengthening access to health services," said Yvette Lacoursiere, MD, MPH, UC San Diego Health System Department of Reproductive Medicine.
The top study findings are:
- Women reported high satisfaction with text4baby, with Spanish-speaking womenreporting even higher satisfaction scores than English‐speaking women.
- 63.1 percent of women reported that text4baby helped them remember anappointment or immunization that they or their child needed.
- 75.4 percent reported that text4baby messages informed them of medical warningsigns they did not know.
- 71.3 percent reported talking to their doctor about a topic that they read on atext4baby message.
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