Online connection appears to boost rates

Being able to connect with doctors online during pregnancy about vaccine concerns may encourage new mothers to make sure their babies get all the recommended shots, according to a new study in Colorado.

Researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Colorado Institute for Health Research found that when moms-tobe were able to ask questions of doctors and other experts through a specially made website, their children were significantly more likely to be fully vaccinated after six months than if the moms weren’t given the option of online interaction.

The study could change how and when doctors start talking to expectant parents about vaccination because it appears that families are already searching for information about vaccines before their babies are born.

“It suggests that maybe at those well-baby visits (after birth) it is a little too late,” said Jason Glanz, a senior investigator at the institute and the study’s lead author. “They’ve already made their decision.”

The study is published this week in the journal Pediatrics.

Colorado once had one of the lower childhood vaccination rates in the country but has recently seen its ranking rise. One of Glanz’s research interests is how to increase vaccination rates among kids.

For this study, he and his colleagues recruited 888 pregnant women in Colorado and assigned them to three equal groups. One group received the care and information that is currently standard practice. But women in the two other groups had access to a new website with vaccine information that the institute built for the study. Half of those women had access to an enhanced feature on the website: the ability to interact with doctors, other experts and each other as they might on social media.

Glanz said researchers found that the moms-to-be who had access to the social media component rarely asked questions of each other. But they did frequently ask questions of the doctors and other experts.

When the study was done — six months after the birth of the women’s children — those families receiving the usual care and those with access to just the informational website showed no significant difference in vaccination rates. But kids whose mothers had access to the social media component of the website were twice as likely to be fully vaccinated as those whose mothers just received the standard care.

Glanz said the result convinced researchers that providing earlier and more varied opportunities for expectant parents to talk with doctors about vaccines will boost vaccination rates.

“The follow-up,” he said, “is to figure out how to implement this into care.”