Audio Health Engagement Analysis in Diabetes: The AHEAD Study

Despite multidisciplinary care and advancements in therapeutics and technology, health outcomes remain suboptimal in pediatric diabetes centers world-wide. A major contributor to poor outcomes is suboptimal diabetes management in pediatric patients and their families. The premise of this research project is that patients and families do not have adequate resources to meet the level of diabetes management that translates to better outcomes. Therefore, we will give them a valuable tool to improve their overall management. The tool is CareCoach.

Research shows that enhancing communication and partnership among patients, parents, and providers is especially critical for optimal outcomes in pediatric diabetes. Communication gaps and conflict can complicate the already complex provider-patient interactions and daily management. We have therefore designed, refined, and made available to consumers a new mobile-based intervention, CareCoach, to improve communication; build trust among providers, patients and parents; and increase overall satisfaction with the quality of diabetes care. This web/mobile application is designed to help patients unobtrusively audio record their clinical encounters, track their medical consults and treatment plans, review information from past visits, create visit discussion guides, and track adherence to medication and dosing schedules. In addition, because mobile-based applications are inexpensive to administer, portable, and available at all times of day, CareCoach holds great promise for communication coaching and contributing to improved diabetes management.

We hypothesize that CareCoach will improve patient-parent-provider communications, build patient-parent-provider trust, and increase overall satisfaction with clinical interactions in a sample of children with type 1 diabetes and their parents. These improvements will lead to significant gains in diabetes management, setting the stage for optimal health outcomes. To test the effectiveness of CareCoach, we will conduct a randomized controlled trial comparing the CareCoach intervention to standard care in a sample of 60 children with type 1 diabetes and their parents.