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text4baby

Free text-message service for pregnant women and new mothers launched in February 2010 by the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition with HHS, CTIA and Voxiva. It sends weekly tips timed to due date or baby's age, and was promoted through outreach campaigns.

Years
2010–now
Country
United States
Topic
Maternal health
Asks people to
Seek helpStart
Strategy
Self efficacySimple instruction
Channel
SMS
Audience
ParentsYoung adults
Pregnant women and mothers of infants under one.

Evidence

ExperimentalMixed

Randomized trial (Evans 2015): high exposure to text4baby was linked to lower self-reported postpartum drinking (OR 0.21). Other outcomes showed no clear effects. An observational study linked text4baby flu messages to higher flu vaccination among pregnant women (Jordan 2017).

Sponsor (who paid)

  • National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition NGO, creator
  • U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Federal government, partner

Credits (who made it)

Not recorded yet.

Sources

  1. Evans W et al. Dose-response effects of the text4baby mobile health program: randomized controlled trial. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2015;3(1):e12 evaluation · 2015 · DOI 10.2196/mhealth.3909 · PMID 25630361
  2. Bushar JA et al. Text4baby Influenza Messaging and Influenza Vaccination Among Pregnant Women. Am J Prev Med 2017;53(6):845-853 evaluation · 2017 · DOI 10.1016/j.amepre.2017.06.021 · PMID 28867143
  3. Bushar JA et al. Enrolling Underserved Women in mHealth Programs: Results From Text4baby Outreach Campaigns. Health Promot Pract 2018:1524839918763589 evaluation · 2018 · DOI 10.1177/1524839918763589 · PMID 29577770
  4. Evans WD et al. Initial outcomes from a 4-week follow-up study of the Text4baby program in the military women's population: randomized controlled trial. J Med Internet Res 2014 evaluation · 2014 · DOI 10.2196/jmir.3297 · PMID 24846909
  5. Evans WD et al. Pilot evaluation of the text4baby mobile health program. BMC Public Health 2012 evaluation · 2012 · DOI 10.1186/1471-2458-12-1031 · PMID 23181985

Research notes

Created 2026-10-22 by literature mining (PubMed/OpenAlex); evidence level, outcome and findings are paraphrased from the evaluation abstracts, full texts not read. No credits: no page naming an agency was checked. Sponsor and launch details from secondary memory; confirm on text4baby.org. Procurement search 2026-10-22: no HHS contract for text4baby found beyond two small 2012 FDA orders to ION Design for a text4baby pregnancy video script and toolkit (USD 17,474); no federal contract for the text-message service or its promotion appears in award records. Evaluation sources added 2026-10-22 (citation snowballing / helpline pass): Evans 2014, Evans 2012; evidence level and outcome unchanged. Reuse terms checked 2026-10-23 by an AI research pass for #47; not yet reviewed by a person.

Record cases/text4baby.json, updated 2026-10-23· Link to this campaign