MHealth Promotion at the CDC

With more than 285 million Americans owning mobile devices, text messaging provides a way to: communicate critical health information with users, promote positive health behavior changes, and alert individuals about critical situations, emergencies, health outbreaks and food recalls. In September 2009, during the height of the H1N1 Flu outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched a text messaging pilot, sending two to three messages a week with important health messages, links CDC's mobile website, and a click-to-call number for CDC's national contact center. As of August 2010, more than 20,000 individuals have subscribed to the pilot and more than one million health messages had been sent. To better understand the effectiveness of this pilot, CDC conducted two rounds of evaluation focused on understand how subscribers used the messages to improve their health habits. Key findings include: 93% said the messages were easy to understand, 92% said they were credible, and 91% said they were friendly; 73% said the messages provided helpful information to improve their health, and 66% of respondents said that they had used the text messages to improve their health; 73% of respondents stated that they were satisfied or very satisfied with the text messages. The evaluation of the text messaging pilot revealed that users want messages to be: Relevant and targeted to an individual's needs and behavioral goals; Engaging and interesting to maintain interest and encourage action; Interactive and social to improve information recall and retention; Emotional and personal to persuade and motivate.