Pretesting mHealth: Implications for Campaigns among Underserved Patients

Abstract

BACKGROUND For health campaigns, pretesting the channel of message delivery and process evaluation is important to eventual campaign effectiveness. We conducted a pilot study to pretest text messaging as a mHealth channel for traditionally underserved patients. AIMS The primary objectives of the research were to assess 1) successful recruitment of these patients for a text message study and 2) whether recruited patients would engage in a process evaluation after receiving the text message. METHODS Recruited patients were sent a text message and then called a few hours later to assess whether they had received, read, and remembered the sent text message. RESULTS We approached twenty patients, of whom fifteen consented to participate. Of these consented participants, ten (67%) engaged in the process evaluation and eight (53%) were confirmed as receiving, reading, and remembering the text message. CONCLUSION We found that traditionally underserved and under-researched patients can be recruited to participate in a text message study, and that recruited patients would engage in a process evaluation after receiving the text message.