Date of Publication

2-2-2009

Abstract

Introduction: Declining blood collection endangers the blood supply at a time when the health care system is requiring an increasingly greater amount of blood products. Blood donation centers are challenged to recruit and develop first-time donors into reliable repeat donors, thereby ensuring a sufficient blood supply. Communication strategies such as e-mail reminders have been shown to be an effective communications tool to promote blood collection. Alternatively, Text Messaging has been shown effective in primary care and preventative medicine. Text messaging improved patient compliance with a schedule of vaccine dosing, as well as improving patient attendance at outpatient clinics. Additionally, text messaging reminders have been shown to be as effective as phone reminders in increasing patient attendance at outpatient appointments. Finally, text messaging has been shown to be useful for managing self-care such as smoking cessation, monitoring asthmatic symptoms, and diabetes control. We investigated whether offering the use a text message reminder to donors would increase attendance at donation events, demonstrating that text messaging can be an effective tool in maintaining a pool of blood donors.

Advisor(s)

Mark Fung, MD, PhD, University of Vermont College of Medicine

Carol Dembeck, American Red Cross - Northern New England Region

Peter Nattress, American Red Cross - Northern New England Region

Jan Carney, MD, MPH, University of Vermont College of Medicine

R. Wilson, American Red Cross - Northern New England Region

Agency

American Red Cross - Northern New England Region

Subjects

Health Communication and Health Information Technology, Public Health Infrastructure

Notes

Presented at the AABB Annual Meeting, October 24 - 27, 2009 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Published as "The Effects of Text Message Reminder on Blood Donor Show Rate," by M K Fung, B Briggs, A. Frascoia, V Petrov-Kondratov, S Rivard, P Thai, L Wendell, M Williams, C Dembeck, J K Carney.

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Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License

The Effects of Text Message Reminder on Blood Donor Show Rate
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