In a study conducted in rural India, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers working in collaboration with Bal Umang Drishya Sanstha (BUDS), a nonprofit Indian organization focused on child health, have found that mobile phone reminders linked with incentives such as free talk time minutes work better than phone alerts alone to improve childhood immunization rates in poor communities.
In a study conducted in rural India, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers working in collaboration with Bal Umang Drishya Sanstha (BUDS), a nonprofit Indian organization focused on child health, have found that mobile phone reminders linked with incentives such as free talk time minutes work better than phone alerts alone to improve childhood immunization rates in poor communities.
The results of the study, which tracked more than 500 child caregivers for nearly a year, appear March 14 in the journal Pediatrics.
Over the last decade, the rate of primary immunizations in young children have significantly improved around the world, but many children remain inadequately immunized. Inadequate immunization is a prominent issue particularly in developing nations, but also in the U.S. Delayed immunization or lack of follow up can lead to disease outbreaks and potentially detrimental health risks.
“Vaccinations and booster shot schedules are designed to work optimally if given within a specific window of time, and even in resource poor areas such as rural India, an estimated 80-90 percent of households have mobile phones,” says Sanjay Jain, M.D., professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Those two factors, he says, made a compelling case for not only using mobile phone alerts more widely, including in poor or isolated areas in the U.S., to remind adults to get their children vaccinated, but also for figuring out the best way to maximize the value of those alerts.
Read more at Johns Hopkins Medicine
Image: Healthcare workers in Haryana, India using tablets to log and access. (Credit: Sanjay Jain and team)
