JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is one of the most important food assistance programs in the U.S., serving 6.4 million low-income eligible women, infants, and children under age 5 in 2019. The program prescribes a list of food benefits for participants to redeem in WIC-authorized stores. However, there are multiple behavioral barriers in the program and the stores that can prevent participants from redeeming the benefits fully.

Objective:

To examine the relationship between the use of a widely used mobile phone app, WICShopper®, to assist the participants and the redemption of food benefits.

Methods:

WIC administrative data from West Virginia in January 2019-January 2020 included 30,719 participants who had any food benefits in that period. The redemption rates of 18 WIC food benefits were compared between app users and non-app users, that is, those who never used the app in the study period. Among the app users, their usage behaviors were defined, including number of active usage benefit cycles, active benefit cycle rates, number of active usage days in the cycle, and proportion rates of weekday and daytime use. Panel linear regressions were applied to examine how the redemption rates were related to these behaviors across time.

Results:

The app users consistently had higher average redemption rates than non-app users; the difference ranged from 3.6 percentage points (4.8% relatively) for infant formula to 14.3 percentage points (40.7% relatively) for fish. After controlling sociodemographics, the coefficients of the app usage were significantly positive except for WIC-eligible medical nutritionals. More active cycles and active days in the cycle were significantly positively related to redemption rates, except for frozen juice (b = −0.002, P > 0.05). The proportion of weekday and daytime app access was negatively associated with only a few food benefits, including infant formula (b = −0.045 and -0.031 respectively, P < 0.001).

Conclusions:

Using the WIC app was significantly related to higher redemption rates across food benefits, though the association varied across benefit categories. Increasing the active days was also positively related to benefit redemptions across food categories. The timing of the app usage was only significantly associated with a few food benefits’ redemption. The WIC app can be an important tool to promote better redemptions among WIC participants.