Refining iN Touch for a Second Cohort
Holly Logan, M.A., iN Touch Project Coordinator, San Francisco State University
During the first cohort, we came across many challenges; some we had anticipated and others surprised us. These learnings allowed us to refine our design and conduct a second cohort. For the second cohort, each participant started out with health coaching only for two months, then received an iPod Touch, and coaching plus TheCarrot’s customized iN Touch application for two months. The refinements addressed the three major challenges faced by the first cohort: 1) Access to Wi-Fi, 2) Coaching protocol, and 3) Staying in contact with the participants.
Many participants told us that the number one reason they had problems with recording their ODLs was because they did not have Wi-Fi at home and did not know where to access it. Although we had installed a Free Wi-Fi Finder app on their iPods, it still seemed that the participants faced a major obstacle when it came to finding Wi-Fi to record their ODLs. To address this issue, we asked Mission High School for permission to give the participants the Wi-Fi password at school. They agreed, so during the iPod provisioning, we entered the password into each device and informed the participants that they could record their ODLs during lunch and after school. This has been working well for the new cohort.
The second challenge was the initial health coach protocol we had created, which detailed how the health coach should direct participants about what to record, when to record, etc. For the first cohort, we sent reminders to ask participants to record, but we didn’t have a set schedule of what we wanted them to do on a weekly basis. For the second cohort, we developed a Health Coach Guide that the health coach was to follow each week when meeting with the participants. This included setting goals, asking participants to record, checking in through text messages and updating the health coaching logs as well as measurements at each visit. This has helped keep the coach and participants better engaged through each step.
Finally, communicating with the patients and scheduling them to come down during school hours was an issue with the first cohort. We had been using a texting application called Text4Plus, but a lot of the participants were not getting our texts. We had no way to know if they had received our messages or not. For the second cohort, we updated all of the iPods by installing iMessage, and sent and received messages through that application. iMessage allowed us to verify whether a message had been delivered. If it did not say ‘delivered,’ we knew to send it again until it was delivered. This has helped us stay in better contact with the second cohort, and we have been able to easily let them know when we have sent a pass for them to come see us during school hours.
We are now in the third month of the new cohort, and we may still face challenges in the next two months. However, we’ve had a lot of success with giving the participants the Wi-Fi password, following a detailed protocol and keeping in contact with them through iMessage.
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