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The IFTF Blog
Raising our Collective Health
Yikes. I haven't blogged in weeks. Well, that's not entirely true. I had written a long post that got eaten by the computer, and I haven't been the same since. But news of HealthRaising, a current Health Horizons project, deserves to be shared.
Leading up to our Fall Conference, "Reinventing Health Care in a Mobile World," we have invited our clients and colleagues to participate in a health raising experience designed to test the persuasive potential of SMS (text messaging) technology to bring about behavior change. Each of us picked one or two health-related practices that we wanted to improve--mine are to drink more water and to get moving. Every couple of days, I get text messages that offer me advice, tips, encouragement, etc. At the end of the day, I get another set of messages that asks me to rate my effort for the day on a scale of 1 to 10. The more effort each of us makes over the next four weeks, the more we raise our collective health score.
Kudos to my colleagues, Miriam Lueck and Jason Tester for making this "experiment" happen. They have been working with Smart Reply, a Southern California-based company that specializes in distributing text messages en masse.