Mobile WACh Empower: Mobile solutions to empower reproductive life planning for women living with HIV

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ ABSTRACT Meeting reproductive health needs of women living with HIV (WLWH) is essential to help women prevent unintended pregnancies, safely conceive, and eliminate mother-to-child HIV transmission (MTCT). Reproductive life planning is complex for WLWH, who are faced with making decisions about antiretroviral treatment selections and potential for drug interactions with contraceptive methods, planning for safe conception, and STI prevention. While family planning (FP) use is high among WLWH, discontinuation of FP is common among women who desire pregnancy prevention, and is an important driver of unmet need for FP and subsequent risk of unintended pregnancy and adverse maternal and child health outcomes. Many programs in sub-Saharan Africa integrate FP service delivery into routine HIV care, but HIV care providers face challenges with implementing these models of care. HIV care providers may be ill equipped to ensure WLWH receive high-quality, rights’ based reproductive health counseling and services due to lack time, training, resources, and skills. Prior studies on integrating FP services into HIV care consistently cite implementation challenges. Mobile health technology may provide a low cost solution to augment counseling services, strengthen health care systems, and alleviate demands on HIV providers. We hypothesize that providing comprehensive counseling and two-way SMS communication, will 1) improve delivery of integrated HIV and reproductive health care services, 2) reduce contraceptive discontinuation rates, 3) be acceptable and feasible to implement, and 4) be cost-effective and contribute to prevention MTCT efforts. We will adapt a unique two-way SMS platform (Mobile WACh) that combines automated bulk SMS messaging and dialogue with a health care provider for a new population, new environment, and new outcomes for long-term impact. The Mobile WACh platform will be customized to provide continuous reproductive life planning counseling for WLWH. We will test the combined intervention in a cluster randomized controlled trial among women receiving HIV care at 10 facilities in Kenya (330 per facility). We propose to evaluate the effect of the counseling and SMS communication intervention, Mobile WACh Empower, on reproductive health outcomes. In Aim 1, we will determine the effect of the Mobile WACh Empower intervention on FP discontinuation, dual method use, and unmet need for FP over 2 years. In Aim 2, we will evaluate acceptability, feasibility, and scalability of implementing Mobile WACh Empower under real- world settings, from both WLWH and provider perspectives in focus group discussions. In Aim 3, we will construct a mathematical model to measure health and economic impacts of Mobile WACh Empower, including cost- effectiveness of the intervention per pregnancy and MTCT averted. This trial will evaluate a novel intervention to address a crucial gap in provision of integrated reproductive health and HIV care, and has the potential to make a significant contribution to global goals of universal access to FP and elimination of MTCT.