Mobile phone aided reminder to promote childhood vaccination: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Background: Vaccines have been demonstrated to reduce the incidence of disease. With global and regional guidance, the World Health Organization provides information and assistance to immunization programs worldwide. Despite all of the efforts, some countries’ vaccination rates remain low. When reminder and recall strategies are employed, vaccination rates in youngsters have been proven to improve. Only a few studies have looked into the effect of reminders sent through mobile phones on vaccine uptake. Objectives and methods: This study aims to evaluate how successful mobile phone-assisted reminders are at improving vaccination uptake rates. For this research, Pub Med, Scopus, Science Direct, and Google Scholar were used to look for papers published in the previous ten years that looked at the effectiveness of mobile phone vaccine reminders for children. These databases’ papers were chosen, extracted, and assessed using the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Out of a total of 1016 articles, ten were chosen for review. Results: According to the chosen articles, the majority of the study involved randomized control trials in both rural and urban settings spanning Africa, Asia, America, and Australia. Most of the research used text message/SMS interventions rather than voice call or phone call treatments. The outcome was determined by appointment adherence, vaccine coverage, and regular immunization completion. Regardless of the type of intervention utilized, the study group had higher vaccination coverage and completion rates than the control groups. In terms of vaccine timeliness, the research groups demonstrated an improvement. Extra incentives, manual calendars, and training have all been shown to be more successful. Providing extra incentives, manual calendars, or training is a more successful means of improving outcomes. Conclusion: Immunization coverage, schedule compliance, and vaccine uptake timeliness have all been proven to improve using mobile phone-assisted reminders in the form of text messages, voice messages, or phone calls. When used in conjunction with incentives, calendars, and training, these reminders help to increase success rates.