India is projected to have 530 million smartphone users in 2018, which can be leveraged to increase coverage of its universal immunisation programme.
A team of researchers have found that reminding people when their vaccinations are due boosts the number of people getting immunised — a finding that may help India increase the coverage of its universal immunisation programme, which is one of the largest in the world.
The study, published in the Cochrane Library recently, summarizes the results of 75 studies from 10 countries including 55 studies involving 138,625 children, adolescents and adults.
The team of scientists analysed the reminders sent by letter, telephone call, computerised telephone call, text message, or a combination of all these formats, and compared these with no reminders, media-based activities aimed at promoting immunizations, or simple general-practice-based immunization awareness campaigns.
The researchers found that reminder and recall systems increase the number of children and adults receiving any kind of immunization.
The study results show that sending reminders may help the government agencies involved in immunization campaigns to get more children and adults receive vaccine doses, especially consudering the deep penetration of mobile phones in the country.
“All types of patient reminder and recall are likely to be effective, and reminding people over the telephone was most effective. Even a small effect of patient reminders and recalls, when scaled to a whole population, could have a large beneficial effect on public health,” says study lead Julie Jacobson Vann from the University of North Carolina.
“As technologies develop we need to consider how they can enhance reminder and recall interventions. For example, we need to learn more about the characteristics of the most effective centralized and text message interventions,” she adds.
