Text4baby Growing Up, Sets Million Mom Goal

Even now in the Information Age, too many mothers lack access to critical information about what to do during their pregnancy to maximize their health and the health of their babies. To fight this, the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB) teamed up with a broad group of private and public partners to create text4baby—a free text message service that provides pregnant women and new moms with information they need to take care of their health and give their babies the best possible start in life.

Text4baby was announced in February and sent its 1 millionth text message in May. The program recently won a Health and Human Services Innovation award and, as of this month, has sent nearly 6 million messages to more than 100,000 subscribers. But that is just a start. Today, at the mHealth Summit held in Washington, DC, with increased support from text4baby sponsor Johnson & Johnson, HMHB announced an exciting new commitment: to reach 1 million moms and moms-to-be by the end of 2012.

The U.S. Government is joining the national text4baby coalition in its goal to enroll 1 million moms.  The government will do its part by strengthening text4baby outreach and promotion efforts through programs like Medicaid; the Women, Infants, and Children program; the network of Federally Qualified Health Centers; and Healthy Start sites.

The Federal government is also committed to understanding the health impact of programs like text4baby, so there are two evaluations underway:

• The Health Resources and Services Administration is leading a cross-departmental effort to evaluate the text4baby program, especially for underserved settings that many government programs target.
• The Department of Defense is conducting an evaluation of the service to understand its value for military families and determine whether a military-specific version of text4baby would make sense.

Text4baby is an innovative way to get information into the hands of expectant and new mothers. We hope you will join us in spreading the word about text4baby. Congratulations to HMHB and its hundreds of private and public partners for providing so much good health information to so many women, and to building the technical support and excitement that will keep text4baby growing in the years ahead.

For more information, or to sign up today, visit text4baby.org.