Pretesting mHealth: Implications for Campaigns among Underserved Patients.

Background: For health campaigns, pretesting the channel of message delivery and process evaluation is important to eventual campaign effectiveness. We conducted a pilot study to pretest text messaging as a mHealth channel for traditionally underserved patients.

Aims: The primary objectives of the research were to assess 1) successful recruitment of these patients for a text message study and 2) whether recruited patients would engage in a process evaluation after receiving the text message.

Methods: Recruited patients were sent a text message and then called a few hours later to assess whether they had received, read, and remembered the sent text message.

Results: We approached twenty patients, of whom fifteen consented to participate. Of these consented participants, ten (67%) engaged in the process evaluation and eight (53%) were confirmed as receiving, reading, and remembering the text message.

Conclusion: We found that traditionally underserved and under-researched patients can be recruited to participate in a text message study, and that recruited patients would engage in a process evaluation after receiving the text message.