A Charity Science Project

Saving Lives with Mobile Technology

Cell phone reminders increase vaccination rates by 8 to 17 percentage points. The wide-scale adoption of cell phones has created an opportunity to increase vaccination rates and reduce preventable deaths with a simple and effective method:
​Sending immunization and other health reminders via text message. 

COST-EFFECTIVE

Vaccine reminders cost only pennies per phone number acquired while increasing vaccination rates by 8-17 percentage points. Our calculations suggest that vaccine reminders have similar cost-effectiveness to the most cost-effective interventions currently known, and this is not even accounting for benefits of other health reminders over text-message platforms.

SCALABLE

Of the 20 million Indian children born each year, only about 65% receive all recommended vaccinations by age two. Text-message vaccine and health reminders could reach millions of people every year.

EVIDENCE-BASED

There are four randomized controlled trials regarding text-message reminders in the developing world that all show a positive impact. Two related Cochrane Reviews also show impact in the developed world. There is also wide-ranging evidence on the positive effects of health reminders in the developed world. Read more about the evidence here. 

OUR PLAN

Our approach is to first spend time testing potentially effective ways of signing up our target population to the program and several ways of delivering the reminders, then publish our findings and scale up what works.