Increasing adolescents' health literacy using social media: Intervention research planning and audience characteristics

In California 88% of teens are insured, however they often don't use their health insurance effectively. We define this broadly as a health literacy issue. This intervention research tests whether a social media intervention can encourage adolescents ages 13 – 17 to better utilize their health insurance benefits. We are partnering with a large health insurance company, Health Net of California, who manages the health care of thousands of adolescents who have public health insurance. The social media website created includes forming a community of users, teen and professionally produced content, storytelling formats, competitions, games, quizzes, blogs, video sharing and other interactive and participatory communication methods. We are using an RCT to test intervention impact, comparing our social media intervention and ‘usual care'. Our initial sample is 8000 Health Net enrollees out of 155,000 Medi-Cal and Healthy Families teens served. A 2-wave comparison groups design uses self report questionnaires as well as administrative data to assess changes in adolescents' utilization patterns, understanding of health insurance benefits, rights and responsibilities, primary care provider encounters, health information seeking, attitudes and health behaviors. Of particular interest is increasing the use of the annual Adolescent Wellness Visit from 36% to 45%. Moreover we are testing whether teens will increase conversations with their doctors about reproductive health, physical health and substance abuse, mental health, violence, or decrease use the emergency room for routine care. We will report on formative research, the social media website and give initial results from the baseline survey.