WAY2GO! PAMF Goes Mobile With Teen Health

Posted on Mar 6, 2012 | 0 comments

If you want to help teens learn lifelong health, wellness and organization habits, how do you reach them? Through their favorite mode of communication – their cell phones.

With that in mind, the PAMF partnered with RallyOn, a Silicon Valley-based online and mobile health application developer, to create an online health and wellness program – called Wellness Assessment for Youth to Get Organized or WAY2GO! – designed specifically for teenagers.

Teenagers start by taking a confidential, online wellness assessment that creates an immediate, individually tailored report with links to health and wellness resources from PAMF’s teen website. Once teens have completed the health assessment they are linked to RallyOn’s free health coaching service that helps them work on daily health goals highlighted in their report such as getting more sleep and exercise or eating better. This engaging tool helps teens develop a personal wellness plan that includes activity challenges and health tips delivered through text messaging.

Prompts to get more sleep, exercise or eat better arrive via text message or email.

The program launched in March, 2011, and now is active in several local high schools as well as a few in Ohio and Wisconsin. So far, 370 people have taken the WAY2GO! teen version. The young adult version just finished beta testing and will be live by April 2012, with a preteen version (that will require parents to register youth) coming within the year.

More than 250 teenagers from Santa Clara County high schools participated in a six-month pilot test of WAY2GO!, funded by a grant from The Health Trust, a local nonprofit organization that aims to advance health and wellness in Silicon Valley.

Today there are more than 75 new users a month, and PAMF has started training nutritionists and doctors on how to use the tool with their teen patients.

“We received wonderful feedback from the teenagers who participated in the WAY2GO! pilot program – they loved this innovative approach to managing their health,” says Nancy Brown, Ph.D., a PAMF education manager and WAY2GO! project director.

The WAY2GO! pilot program has already received nationwide recognition. In March, 2011, it was awarded the 2011 Hilary E.C. Millar Award for Innovative Approaches to Adolescent Health Care by the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.