Case Study: UCSD School of Medicine achieves scalable, reliable SMS patient engagement to promote health with Twilio

UCSD School of Medicine Promotes Health & Prevents Disease With Sms

The Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems (CWPHS) at UC San Diego School of Medicine has run two‑way SMS studies since 2007 to promote health and prevent disease across areas like medication adherence, weight loss, and mental‑health monitoring. Early projects showed promise but suffered from technical hiccups and waning long‑term engagement, so CWPHS needed a more robust, scalable messaging platform that could support personalized, multilingual, bidirectional communications and clinician escalation pathways.

CWPHS built a single messaging engine on Twilio to send and receive tailored, decision‑tree driven messages 24/7, escalate alerts to clinicians, and support programs such as iTAB, MDIET, PsyPhone, MD2Me, ConTxt, and Profast. The platform powered 16 studies with ~1,800 participants, sent 900K messages and received 240K, increased deliverability and engagement, and lowered costs to under $0.05 per participant per day (~$1/month), enabling scalable global deployment and helping secure further NIH funding.

UCSD School of Medicine

Fredric Raab

Senior Systems Engineer