Miami — Text daily educational and treatment reminder messages to patients with atopic dermatitis and you just might get a big “TY” message back.
That’s a “Thank You.”'
Reminder text messages were associated with improved treatment adherence, health maintenance behaviors, and possibly disease severity in a study of 20 patients aged 14 years and older, Venessa Pena-Robichaux reported in a poster at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology.
The patients, who had a mean age of 29.6 years, received daily texts for 6 weeks, which alternated between reminders (such as, “Please remember to use the medication or product you use to treat your atopic dermatitis today!”) and educational messages (such as, “People with atopic dermatitis have a lifelong tendency to develop skin infections.”). Eighty-five percent of participants said they found the medication reminder messages helpful, 90% said they found the educational messages helpful, 80% said they would like to keep receiving the messages, and 85% said they would recommend the texting program to a friend, said Ms. Pena-Robichaux, a fourth-year medical student at Harvard Medical School, Boston.
The texts were not only welcomed by the participants, they appeared to improve medication use: 80% of patients reported an increase in the number days each week that they were adherent to their medical treatment. The number of days of medication use increased from a prestudy mean of 3.7 days per week to a poststudy mean of 6.1 days. Additionally, 95% of patients reported an improvement in at least one health maintenance behavior during the study period, and the SCORing Atopic Dermatitis (SCORAD) index decreased in 70% of patients from pre- to post study by a mean of 7.3 points on the 100-point scale.
Given the popularity of cell phones and text messaging – and in particular the tech-savvy nature of younger patients these days (about half of the participants in this study were college students), the potential of this simple and cost-effective intervention for improving positive health behaviors deserves a second look, Ms. Pena-Robichaux said, noting that a larger randomized controlled study of the texting program is in the works and could be underway B 4 2 long.