“No more paper!”: Community health workers go digital

Hispanics are drivers of growth and trend setters for mobile phones and online video. The “digital divide” has narrowed and low-income, immigrant and traditionally hard-to-reach Hispanic communities are becoming an increasingly mobile-first population.

Community Health Workers/Promotores are at the vanguard of this new mobile-first world. In a series of focus groups with promotores held to explore changing outreach habits, findings showed a shift away from traditional print materials and towards mobile phones. Promotores described routinely using cell phones at work to text clients, view websites and videos together, share photos and demonstrate how to search the Internet. Brochures, flyers and similar hand-outs were characterized as out-of-touch and ineffective. A strong desire surfaced for educational tools accessible via mobile, particularly narrative video.

Promotores reported that their Spanish-dominant clients were equally tech-savvy, a finding corroborated through additional research with low-income, Spanish-dominant Hispanics. In our study, many were heavily reliant on mobile devices and used them as their sole or primary gateway to the Internet.

Based on these findings we developed a Spanish-language educational resource that relies primarily on video and is optimized for use on mobile devices; the first such tool of its kind in the U.S. A teaching curriculum based on principles of adult learning is accessible on the site along with talking points, tips and links.

In an evaluation, nearly 90% of 130 promotores reviewing the resource planned to incorporate it into their work. Promotores’ increasing reliance on mobile devices presents a significant opportunity for health education.