Cell phone–based health education messaging improves health literacy

Abstract

Background: The ubiquity of cell phones, which allow for short message service (SMS), provides new and innovative opportunities for disease prevention and health education. Objective: To explore the use of cell phone-based health education SMS to improve the health literacy of community residents in China. Methods: A multi-stage random sampling method was used to select representative study communities and participants ≥ 18 years old. Intervention participants were sent health education SMSs once a week for 1 year and controls were sent conventional, basic health education measures. Health literacy levels of the residents before and after the intervention were evaluated between intervention and control groups. Results: Public health literacy scores increased 1.5 points, from 61.8 to 63.3, after SMS intervention for 1 year (P<0.01); the increase was greater for males than females (2.01 vs. 1.03; P<0.01) and for Shenzhen local residents than non-permanent residents (2.56 vs. 1.14; P<0.01). The frequency of high health literacy scores was greater for the intervention than control group (22.03% to 30.93% vs. 22.07% to 20.82%). With health literacy as a cost-effective index, the cost-effectiveness per intervention was 0.54. Conclusion: SMS may be a useful tool for improving health literacy.

Establishing the efficacy of interventions to improve health literacy and health behaviours: a systematic review

“…Of the 22 included studies, the earliest study was from 2014 [30], the latest from 2020 [35][36][37] with the majority (fourteen) being published since 2018 [32-37, 44, 45, 47-52]. Eighteen studies were randomised and included 1 cross over design [50], 5 cluster randomised [39,41,44,47,51] and 12 individually randomised trials [30-32, 34, 36-38, 40, 43, 45, 49, 52]. The remaining four were quasi-experimental pre-post controlled trials [33,35,42,48].…”

“…The remaining four were quasi-experimental pre-post controlled trials [33,35,42,48]. Studies took place in nine countries -USA [30,31,37,39,40,42,43,45], Australia [35,51,52], Iran [32,34,47], China [41,44], Japan [36,49], Taiwan [48], Niger [38], Germany [50] and Demark [33].…”

“…Two studies focused on the domain of disease prevention (cancer screening [39] and malaria health literacy [38]), eight focused on healthcare (diabetes [30,37], gestational diabetes [32], breast cancer [36], cardiac conditions [33,34], one or more chronic conditions [35] and people taking two or more medications daily [31]). The remaining 12 studies focused on health promotion with eight focusing on general health promotion [41,42,44,45,48,[50][51][52], two focusing on nutrition [40,43], one on nutrition and physical activity [49] and one on smoking prevention [47]. Studies are summarised in Table 1.…”

Effect of enhanced reminders on postnatal clinic attendance in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: a cluster randomized controlled trial

“…Randomized trials indicated mobile phone reminder improves appointment compliance [20,23,24], adherence to ART and Tb medications [25,26]. In addition, it facilitates provision of health education, counseling [27,28] and behavioral change interventions [17,29].…”

Test@Work Texts: Mobile Phone Messaging to Increase Awareness of HIV and HIV Testing in UK Construction Employees During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…a focus on HIV and sexual health). It is possible that response may increase with greater interaction, on-demand information and variation in delivery, through algorithmic approaches to text message replies, custom SMS gateways or peer led two-way SMS services although these approaches would occur an increased manpower and/or software development cost, contrary to the low cost appeal of SMS interventions [23,86].…”