Improving Adolescent Sexual Health Outcomes using Health Information Technology

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Project Abstract Adolescents account for nearly half of all new sexually transmitted infection (STI) cases annually, and of those, non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic youth are disproportionately affected. These disparities are attributed, in part, to differential access to and routine use of quality health care, including STI prevention and treatment. The overarching goal of our research efforts are to improve adolescent sexual health outcomes and mitigate disparities in STI rates by leveraging health information technology (HIT) in the emergency department (ED) to enable detection and treatment of STIs through shared decision making. The objective of this proposal is to scale and optimize our successful process in improving STI testing rates by leveraging HIT to: 1) seamlessly integrate broad-scale targeted STI screening through the provision of real-time, electronic health record embedded, clinical decision support (CDS) based on patient-reported STI-risk assessment into the normal ED workflow to improve STI detection and 2) use mobile Health (mHealth) to improve STI treatment rates. Building on our preliminary work, the specific aims are to: 1) use a human factors engineering approach to implement and optimize a broad-scale computer-facilitated STI screening process into the clinical workflow of the ED; 2) compare differences in STI detection rates between a sexual health screening (SHS)-derived electronic CDS strategy versus usual care (no provision of CDS); and 3) compare differences in treatment adherence between patients receiving text messages versus those receiving usual care (no text messages). Within the first aim, we will use a human factors engineering approach to conduct workflow analyses which will inform the refinement of implementation of an STI screening process into the clinical workflow of the ED. In the second aim, we will conduct a pragmatic trial using an interrupted time series design to measure the impact of SHS-derived electronic CDS on STI detection rates. In the third aim, we will conduct a randomized clinical trial, nested within the pragmatic trial, to measure the impact of a two-way text-messaging intervention to improve treatment rates through identifying and addressing barriers to STI treatment adherence. This innovative approach leverages HIT to electronically integrate patient-reported sexual risk data to guide CDS and mHealth to improve treatment adherence. We expect our contribution to help improve sexual health outcomes and reduce disparities in the burden of STIs among at-risk, vulnerable adolescents by increasing STI detection and treatment adherence. The proposed work is significant because it has the potential to improve the health of the millions of adolescents who access EDs as their only source of healthcare and impact national policies related to STI detection and treatment. In addition, this work can provide proof of concept for leveraging HIT to deliver patient-centered care with shared decision making to address health care disparities and improve healthcare quality and outcomes, which can be applied to other types of screening interventions in the future.