Year: 2009
Type: article
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.
Authors: Benjamin Briggs, Alan J. Frascoia, Vadim Petrov-Kondratov, Shayna S Rivard, Phan Thai, Lauren Wendell, Matthew Williams, Carol Dembeck, Peter Nattress, R. Wilson, Mark Fung, Jan K. Carney
Institution: University of Vermont
Language: English
Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2399295997