BACKGROUND
Recent research on health care delivery has shown that mobile based interventions are effective in bringing behavior change among clinical populations. Mobile phone-based interventions are considered to be convenient and economical to the provider and non-invasive and hence acceptable to the receiver. Studies have also shown that personalized text message reminders are more acceptable and effective than automated mass messages. However, despite the increasing literature on mobile phone-based interventions (mHealth) contributing to improvement in health care, there is a dearth of information on the use of reminders for social and medical service referrals provided to nonclinical populations by community-engagement programs.
OBJECTIVE
This pilot study aimed to apply mobile phone-based interventions to improve the utilization rates of medical and social service referrals provided to community members by Community Health Workers (CHW’s) through HealthStreet – a community engagement initiative at the University of Florida (UF).
METHODS
300 eligible HealthStreet members were randomly assigned to CALLSONLY, TEXTONLY, CALLS+TEXT reminder intervention groups. Reminders were sent based on their assignment on the 15th and 45th day after the baseline assessment reminding them to utilize the medical and/or social referrals that were provided by the community health workers based on their expressed need during the baseline assessment. A telephonic follow up was done on the 30th and 60th day to assess the rate of utilization of the referrals. Further, a telephone based brief satisfaction survey was also administered to all participants on the 60th day follow up call.
RESULTS
Out of 290 participants, 201 (69.3%) successfully completed the 30-day HealthStreet follow up and 149 (51.4%) participants successfully completed the 60-day HealthStreet follow up. At the 30-day follow up, 52 of the 201 respondents reported the use of at least one referral and there were no differences for utilization by contact status. At the 60-day follow up, 69 of the 149 participants reported utilizing at least one referral; there were no differences for this group either.
CONCLUSIONS
Findings from this study did not find any significant difference in the rate of service referral utilization between participants who received different types of reminders. The absence of a significant difference between the two groups may be because of the smaller sample size of the study.