Effectiveness of short message service reminder scheme in Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation for children's vaccination: A telephonic survey

Background: Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) cares for every child. It has introduced a short message service (SMS) reminder scheme for children's vaccination, to make their life healthier and secure. SMS as a reminder tool can be extremely effective in health care. Aim: To assess the effectiveness of vaccination SMS reminder scheme by GHMC on mobile phones of parents. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 349 subjects whose children were born between January 1, 2014 and June 30, 2014 using telephonic survey method from five hospitals selected randomly. Telephone calls were made to interview using a structured questionnaire. Results: Among 349 subjects, 279 participated in the study for phone interview and 70 subjects (20.1%) did not participate. Among 279 subjects, 21.8% (76) subjects received SMS from GHMC whereas 43.8% (158) did not receive, 4.58% (16) subjects do not know how to read SMS, 7.2% (25) subjects did not see the messages and 2.6% (9) subjects were not sure if they were receiving the SMS from GHMC or not. Majority of subjects 71.9% wished to get the reminder SMS from GHMC regularly. Conclusion: The use of SMS reminder scheme for children's vaccination was encouraged by majority of subjects. However, the GHMC scheme was efficient in reaching only 21.8% of the subjects.