Assessment of Patient Willingness to SMS based health promotion and its associated factors in Northern Ethiopia: A facility based cross-sectional study

Abstract

Background: - The health system collaborating with mobile technology has created a mixed-expertise called mHealth. mHealth is about using mobile technology for treatment compliance, appointment reminders, community mobilization, and awareness-raising over health issues. Toll-free voice calls, downloadable third-party mobile applications, and bulk SMS are among the many different types of mHealth Initiatives. SMS is ubiquitous, lean, and with far-reaching technological capacity for infrastructure constraint setting. SMS-based health intervention mainly focuses on health education, self-management, health promotion, and health service provision. Different SMS-based health promotion implementation researches have been implemented in different parts of the globe. The findings of these researches conclude that SMS-based health promotion was efficacious towards addressing the intended purpose. But, according to the WHO observatory survey, raising awareness using mHealth initiatives have shown a low level of service uptake globally. Most of these researches were in developed countries, and taking these results ASIS and opting to implement it in low- and middle-income countries may have its own drawbacks. The purpose of this research is to assess patient willingness to SMS-based health promotion and identify its associated factors.Method: - Facility based cross-sectional study was used. Data were collected using adopted and customized questionnaire from previous studies. By means of single population proportion formula and simple random sampling technique, 400 Outpatient and inpatient visitors to Ayder comprehensive specialized hospital from September 2019 up to October 2020 were selected. SPSS v.26 was used to analyze descriptive statistics and associativity properties.Result: - Of all 400 participants, 343(85.75%) are willing to receive SMS intervention for health promotion. Though gender was not a moderator, education, age and settlement are associative factors for SMS based health promotion (P > 0.001). Most of Participants prefers to start the SMS service within one month (335(97.7)) and are in need of receiving the messages once a week (136(39.7%)) late in the evening (199 (58.0%)).Conclusion: The study showed that SMS willingness for health promotion was high. This study also revealed that the associated demographic factors such as Education and age should be given a special emphasis in designing and implementing SMS based intervention. Besides the type, mode and timing of the SMS service should be in line with the health intervention.