142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

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Development of a tailored mHealth platform to improve HIV testing and linkage to care in a new immigrant receiving community

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Suzanne Grieb, PhD, MSPH , Center for Child and Community Health Research, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
Alejandra Flores-Miller , Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, MD
Ryan Clifford, MFA , Center for Design Practice, Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore, MD
Carla Zelaya, PhD , Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD
Kathleen Page, MD , Center for Clinical Global Health Education, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
Rapid demographic changes in new immigrant receiving communities result in a lag between the arrival of immigrants and the development of culturally and linguistically appropriate health programming. The Latino Outreach Program is a community-academic partnership within the Baltimore City Health Department created to address local HIV disparities among Latino immigrants.  Despite this program, which provides culturally relevant Spanish language community outreach, HIV testing, and linkage to care, Latino immigrants continue to be diagnosed late. Over the past decade, interventions using cell phones and text messaging have been used to increase HIV testing rates and, more recently, mobile health (mHealth) platforms have been developed to deliver individually-tailored health information. After a community survey and focus groups with Latino immigrants demonstrated support for a tailored mHealth platform approach, our partnership expanded to include graphic designers to develop mHealth platform visual tools. Through partner research activities and a nominal group technique exercise to prioritize local HIV testing barriers to inform messaging content options, tailored modules including animation, video, and graphics were developed, tested through focus groups, and revised. This platform provides tailored HIV messaging through interactive modules that are delivered by outreach workers. Follow-up text messages are delivered periodically. This presentation will describe the process of developing this innovative mHealth platform as part of the community-academic partnership to improve HIV testing and linkage to care in this new immigrant receiving community.

Learning Areas:

Communication and informatics
Diversity and culture
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Program planning
Public health or related research
Social and behavioral sciences

Learning Objectives:
Discuss how community-academic partnerships can improve health outcomes by tailoring program efforts to local needs within a community of rapidly changing demographics

Keyword(s): Community-Based Research (CBPR), Immigrant Health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have worked in collaboration with the Latino Outreach Program for over 3 years, and have helped the team through all stages of this work, including formative data collection and analysis, platform survey development, concept design, and piloting.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.