Healthy Tomorrow vs iFY

Healthy Tomorrow is an educational app developed by McMillen Health, a respected leader in preventive health education. McMillen’s goal with Healthy Tomorrow is to improve health outcomes for parents and their families. It follows the Safe, Stable, Nurturing Families Model and has short, easy-to-understand educational videos, a discussion forum, and a portal for app users to invite a supporter to follow their journey. In 2018, McMillen Health conducted a community needs assessment, called In Her Words, to find out how we could contribute to solving the opioid epidemic. We had honest and eye-opening conversations with pregnant and new parents who have opioid use disorder (OUD). We also talked to professionals serving these parents and their babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. What we discovered: accessible educational resources are critically needed yet virtually non-existent. Interview participants overwhelmingly asked for educational content in video format that they could easily access from their phones. These findings inspired McMillen to develop Healthy Tomorrow, a mobile app with educational videos geared towards parents. Topics include OUD and NAS, safe sleep, breastfeeding, birth spacing, prenatal nutrition, tobacco cessation, and prenatal health. App users can earn rewards for viewing videos and answering a few questions. Some of the topics covered in the app: - Caring for yourself and your baby during pregnancy - What to expect at the hospital - What to know after taking your baby home - How to build a support network - Your mental health during and after pregnancy - The importance of staying in treatment for OUD

IFY is a multilingual learning platform for newcomers to the US so you can learn about health, safety, laws, and everyday life and customs in your new home. Select from 18 languages and watch hundreds of videos in that language, earning badges as your knowledge increases. Personalize your profile by taking a photo or choosing one from your phone’s photo library. Organize and customize your layout so you can focus on the topics that are most important to you. Use the in-app calendar feature to be alerted to holidays and important dates in the US and watch videos related to them. Sync the app’s calendar with your phone’s calendar to enable reminders with Siri voice commands and access content even when you’re offline. Easily share videos with friends via social media and messaging apps directly from the app. Notifications alert you when a new video is added to the app, so you’ll never miss out on important information. iFY organizes videos into intuitive categories like Employment, Health, Weather and Climate, and Transportation, and marks them using universal symbols, making the app accessible to people of all literacy levels. English videos are captioned for increased accessibility for Deaf and Hard of Hearing users. iFY content has been vetted by health, legal, and safety experts and the Vermont Language Justice Project (a nonprofit), and is translated by highly-qualified professionals living and working in the US. You can watch videos to learn about everything from driving safely in winter, to getting a mammogram, to opening a bank account, to taking care of your dental health, to calling 911, to staying safe during a flood. iFY is available in English, Arabic, Burmese, Dari, French, Haitian Kreyol, Kirundi, Mandarin, Maay Maay, Mandarin Chinese, Nepali, Pashto, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tigrinya, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. The ease of toggling back and forth between languages makes iFY a useful teaching tool for educators and service providers working with immigrants and refugees. Adjusting to life in a new country is challenging and iFY’s engaging audiovisual content and user-friendly design makes it fun and easy for newcomers to advance on the path of learning. Watching and listening to videos on a huge range of important topics, sharing them with friends and family, and earning badges to celebrate your achievements all make the learning and adjustment process more enjoyable and effective