A 3-year capstone project of the HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology — the Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program — is at the forefront of the initiative. It will provide funding to 17 health information technology “information hubs” in diverse US communities. This fall, two of those communities — Southeast Michigan Beacon Community in Detroit, Mich. and the Crescent City Beacon Community in New Orleans, La. — will kick off a mobile health campaign to provide health and wellness resources to patients with type 2 diabetes.
About 385,000 people in Louisiana are living with diabetes, according to Vivian Fonseca, MD, chief of the section of endocrinology at Tulane University Health Sciences Center. The need to reach people with diabetes is also great in Wayne County, Mich., where 21% of the population has type 1 or 2 diabetes, Robin Nwankwo, RD, MPH, CDE, an ADA volunteer on the leadership board for the Michigan and Northern Ohio market, said in a press release.
The mobile health pilots in Detroit and New Orleans will be modeled after the national Text4Baby campaign, which was founded in-part by leading mobile health provider Voxiva. The campaign sends evidence-based health tips to pregnant women and new mothers via text message. Voxiva will also develop and provide the services for the Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program.
The program is designed to reach individuals with undiagnosed diabetes and those at risk for the disease by providing the ability to engage with a large population via information technology while also tailoring information to each patient based on individual risk factors. In most cases, this means ensuring patients connect to medical professionals who can help them manage their condition before costly complications arise, according to a press release. During the next 2 months, the campaigns will be designed and tested in Detroit and New Orleans.
“While we will be developing the specifics of the technology, we know for sure this will be a community-wide effort,” Anjum Khurshid, PhD, MBBS, MPAff, director of Health Systems Development and project director of the Crescent City Beacon Community in New Orleans, said during the press briefing. “We will involve community organizations and different players within the community; we aren’t looking at this just as a technology intervention, we are looking at it as a community campaign.”
For Herbert C. Smitherman, Jr., MD, MPH, assistant dean of community and urban health at Wayne State University Medical Center, “this is an opportunity to demonstrate and learn how to do this effectively in basic, smaller communities; once we get the kinks out of it then [we’ll] scale it up to larger communities,” he said at the press briefing.
Read More: Mobile health initiative uses information technology to increase diabetes awareness
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