Pretesting mHealth: Implications for Campaigns among Underserved Patients

Area of Science:

• Health communication
• Mobile health (mHealth)
• Pilot studies

Background:

• Pretesting message delivery channels and process evaluation are crucial for health campaign effectiveness.
• Text messaging (mHealth) was pretested as a communication channel for underserved patient populations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the successful recruitment of underserved patients for a text message study.
• To determine if recruited patients would engage in a process evaluation following text message delivery.

Main Methods:

• Patients were sent a text message.
• A follow-up call assessed message receipt, reading, and recall.

Main Results:

• Fifteen out of twenty approached patients consented to participate (75%).
• Ten participants (67%) engaged in the process evaluation.
• Eight participants (53%) confirmed receipt, reading, and recall of the text message.

Conclusions:

• Traditionally underserved and under-researched patient groups can be recruited for mHealth text message studies.
• Recruited patients demonstrated willingness to engage in process evaluations after receiving text messages.