Did You Get My Snap? Snapchat as a Health Education Tool for Hospitalized Adolescents

Given the popularity of Snapchat with teens, we used this tool to disseminate reproductive health information to adolescent patients.

We developed a unique Snapcode linked to educational materials located on a cloud service and accessible via the Snapchat app. The Snapcode was printed on a business card and distributed to hospitalized adolescents. We tracked card distribution and how often the materials were accessed through our cloud service and through Snapchat.

A total of 236 cards were distributed to teens with 117 unique scans and 122 views of the PDF. Of the teens who received the card (N = 236), 49.5% of teens used the Snapcode to access reproductive health education.

Snapchat is a promising way to distribute educational materials to adolescents in a discrete manner on a platform many teens use. This mechanism demonstrates a way for providers to use Snapchat as a tool to provide education to hospitalized adolescents.