Diabetes Connect: Developing a Mobile Health Intervention to Link Diabetes Community Health Workers with Primary Care

Community Health Worker interventions offer a promising strategy for improving diabetes self-management and health outcomes, with evidence to support its effectiveness, particularly in underserved communities. However, there is limited evidence on how to most effectively integrate CHW programs with primary care efforts. Mobile health technology (mHealth) can connect CHWs to members of the health care team, creating synergy through the bidirectional exchange of information. This project represents a partnership between an academic institution, a safety net health system, and a local community based organization of African American Churches. Our overarching goal was to develop an effective model for the integration of a community health worker (CHW) delivered peer support program with primary care-based efforts to improve glycemic control and health outcomes. We employed an iterative, user-centered approach to develop an mHealth tool that allows for the effective and secure exchange of information between CHWs and the primary care team, allowing patients to benefit from coordinated efforts.  Five CHWs and three health care providers were trained to use the system and provide real time feedback to the study team. To date, satisfaction with the system is high. We have enrolled 120 low-income African American patients with diabetes into an ongoing randomized controlled trial designed to demonstrate feasibility and provide an estimate of the intervention’s effectiveness. In this presentation we will describe development of the mHealth communication system in terms of both the process and the content. The integration of mHealth technology into CHW programs is innovative, advancing the science of developing and delivering sustainable community-based interventions.