Jaan Sidorov, MD’s Disease Management Care blog provides an overview of a just-published article in Epidemiologic Reviews (subscription required) on ‘Text Messaging as a Tool for Behavior Change in Disease Prevention and Management’. According to the blog post, the article focuses on five existing studies on common chronic diseases and how text messaging was used. ‘According to the authors, texting has the advantage of being inexpensive, personalized, efficient, widely accessible, consumerist and ‘asynchronous.’ The bad news is that it can medically marginalize persons without access to cell phones or who are unable to read.’ Looking at the quality of the studies, Dr. Sidorov urges providers using text messaging to do better quality research–and predicts that texting could emerge strongly for care before the ink on ‘healthcare reform’ has dried.
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The opportunity in these disadvantages…
To me it’s all in the service design. It won’t be the SMS that marginalizes patients but the bad design of the SMS service.
SMS services can be designed to effectively identify which patients have problems reading, similarly offering low cost SMS services to the patients who have access to mobiles doesn’t necessarily have to marginalise those that don’t – in fact in many cases it can generate significant financial/time/staff savings that care providers can then redeploy to help those that need extra assistance.