Text Messaging Allows Expectant Mothers to Stay Ahead of Their Pregnancy

We just read this and wanted to pass along. From Kaiser Health News:

Free text-messaging service for pregnant women

Health advocates say it’s important to tailor digital health technologies to lower-income people not only to be fair, but because they’re more likely to have chronic illnesses, like diabetes, that are expensive to treat…For now, experiments targeting low-income people are a tiny part of the digital health industry, which racked up an estimated $4.5 billion in venture funding in 2015 alone…

Some initiatives are simple and cheap, like Text4Baby. The free text-messaging service for pregnant women and new moms offers English- and Spanish-language information about prenatal care, labor and delivery, breastfeeding, developmental milestones, and immunizations — all timed to the baby’s due date.

Operated by the nonprofit ZERO TO THREE and the mobile health company Voxiva, Inc., Text4Baby has reached nearly 1 million women since starting in 2010. In one survey, more than half of them reported yearly incomes of less than $16,000.