Abstract:

Infant mortality in the US is a pressing issue; the US ranks amongst the worst of many developing countries’ infant mortality rankings, despite the fact that the US spends many fold more per capita on healthcare than other developed nations. While the infant mortality issue in the US can be attributed to many root causes, our intervention aims to equip mothers to be their families’ own advocates. In this project, we explored how an app can meet women’s needs so as to equip them to engage in practices associated with healthy infant outcomes.

Our project brought together midwives, digital literacy experts, information technology specialists, health promotion educators and women themselves. This presentation will report the developments and findings from our ongoing project to develop and refine a maternal education app designed to educate families and connect them with resources to meet their material and healthcare needs. This presentation builds on our previous work on patient and caregiver needs analysis; this presentation will focus on the new outcomes of the actual app itself and stakeholder feedback about the app. Namely, we will briefly review our app development process, but focus on showcasing the app’s design and features. We will also discuss stakeholder response to the app--we will provide data from midwife and patient focus groups.

Our practical experiences and research findings would be relevant to others looking to use technology, such as apps, to support resource navigation and education of underserved populations. We will present our underlying platform, our homegrown modular resource center, and make a brief reference about how this platform could be extended to other uses and collaborations. We will also discuss practical lessons learned in the areas of developing educational video content and resource navigation online aids.

Keywords:

Infant mortality, patient education, digital applications, resource navigation.