Text message interventions for follow up of infants born to mothers positive for Chagas disease in Tucumán, Argentina: a feasibility study

Gabriela Cormick, Alvaro Ciganda, Maria L. Cafferata, Michael J. Ripple, Sergio Sosa-Estani, Pierre Buekens, José M. Belizán, Fernando Althabe

Diagnosis of congenital Chagas disease occurs at 9 months of age, making effective treatment challenging due to loss to follow-up. Mobile health (mHealth) has been utilized to improve communication and treatment adherence in many chronic diseases, although no studies of mHealth in Trypanosoma cruzi-infected individuals have been conducted. Text message interventions, a subset of mHealth, has shown to improve appointment attendance and is relatively simple to set up, thus making it an ideal mechanism to facilitate communication with individuals in low-resource settings. The aim of this study is to understand the acceptability, utilization, and barriers of an SMS-based appointment reminder to confirm a post-partum home visit to women in Tucumán, Argentina and whether these factors differ in urban and rural populations. Women that tested positive for Chagas disease were invited to receive SMS reminders of their follow-up 4-week postpartum home visit. Demographic information and SMS contact preferences were collected at hospital discharge, and variables on mHealth utilization and barriers were recorded at follow-up. 77 (70.6 %) of women possessed a cell phone for personal use. All eligible women owned phones compatible with SMS messages. The appointment reminder SMS was widely accepted with 64/72 (88.9 %) enrolled women receiving the SMS message and 58/64 (90.6 %) replying. Ninety-two percent of women stated that the text message was a useful reminder for the follow-up home visit. Women living in rural areas were less likely to own a cell phone for personal use and were significantly less likely to have internet access on their phone than women living in urban areas (RR 0.30, 95 % CI 0.10-0.89). Furthermore, women from rural areas faced barriers to mHealth uptake such as change of phone number and response to messages from the hospital team at higher rates than women from urban areas, although these differences were not statistically significant. There is generally widespread acceptance and utilization of mHealth among this group of women with access to cell phones. However, there are still many barriers to overcome before mHealth interventions attain complete penetration in a population, most notably the issue of cell phone for personal use.