Podcast Interview Transcript
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In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The associate editors who handled the articles conduct our Beyond the Manuscript interviews. This edition of Beyond the Manuscript features Vida Henderson, Claudia Guajardo, and Gloria Palmisano authors and community partners of "Community-Based Participatory Research and User-Centered Design in a Diabetes Medication Information and Decision Tool," and Associate Editor Shonali Saha.
Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us today. To start, can you provide a brief summary of how your project, including its purpose and any results you've found—if you could provide a brief summary so everybody who's listening could be oriented to the project?
Our aim was to develop an interactive tailored web-based version of two [Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality] AHRQ consumer guides that focus on diabetes medication, and to compare the effectiveness of the web-based tool that we developed versus the AHRQ printed paper-based consumer guide.
We called the tool iDecide/Decido, and it was designed specifically for African-Americans and Latinos in Detroit, who have poorly controlled type 2 diabetes. Basically, the goal of the program is to provide information on the pathology and complications of diabetes, to describe how different diabetes medications work, to give the participants opportunity to learn about and discuss other treatment options that they may not be aware of, and also to discuss their barriers when it comes to taking their diabetes medications as well as to set goals for their future.
In developing the tool, we utilized the principles of community-based participatory research [CBPR] and user-centered design [UCD]. The tool is administered in the participants' homes or their place of preference with a community health worker on an iPad. The program has really great features like 3D animations, risk pictographs, and interactive issue cards. It's also tailored. Claudia, who is our community helper, has used it in the field.
I enjoyed working with both groups because it was really amazing to see differences in how it was received. I can say that the participants who were in the control group weren't really aware of what they were missing compared with the intervention group, but the actual consumer guides were a great help in seeing the differences in medications, and they were glad to keep it with them, you know, something they can share with other people who are going through the same thing that they are. [End Page 185]
The participants who were in the intervention group were fascinated by the program. They loved the tool. Most didn't actually want to handle the tool themselves, but they loved the animations and seeing what's going on inside their bodies. There's nothing else that can compare with that. They were also really receptive to learning new ways to communicate with their doctors, you know, letting them know, "Well, I've learned this about medication," and they felt more comfortable with speaking with their doctors afterward about any changes or any questions that they had.
Your partnership goes beyond the traditional CBPR model of health researchers partnering with community members to also include communication and technology experts. Can you tell us more about how that partnership was formed?
I'm going to talk a little bit of how REACH was formed and then just briefly a little bit about our work and how that came to lead us to the collaboration with CHCR. The REACH Detroit Partnership, which is a community project of CHASS Center, which is a federally qualified health center, so the partnership arose from a core of members of the Detroit Community Academic Urban Research Center that had been using community-based participatory researches approach to identify and plan to address health disparities in southwest and east side of Detroit...
