Digital Tools to Support Healthcare Decision Making

The overarching goal of the project is to enable diverse older adults, including those of lower SES or with cognitive impairments (e.g., MCI), to achieve their health goals by supporting the cognitive components of health-management activities, through development of digital assistant technology tools. Tool development will be guided by an understanding of the preferences, needs, and cognitive capabilities and limitations of older adults. Each of the CREATE sites will lead efforts. CREATE resources will be used to maximal potential through utilization of the machine learning and artificial intelligence expertise of our partners at the WCM site for support of the development of digital assistant technology tools for medicare. Importantly, data collection related to development and evaluation of the tools for each of the task activities will occur at all sites to maximize the design of the cognitive support tools and the generalizability of the findings.

Clinical Trial, the primary objective is focused on evaluating the feasibility, acceptability and usability of the SideKick digital support tool (adapted for this study for Medicare) with a diverse sample of adults age 60+ with and without a cognitive impairment. This is a feasibility trial. The study design is a pilot RCT. Following a baseline assessment, participants will be randomized into a Medicare.gov Condition or the SideKick condition. Participants will complete a series of queries related to Medicare enrollment and plan selection (that vary in complexity) using medicare.gov or Sidekick. Their performance and perceptions (e.g., challenges, usability, usefulness, etc.) will be evaluated upon completion of the queries.

This clinical trial was originally registered as part of NCT05811338.

Inclusion criteria

• Some internet proficiency is required; participants will need to answer Yes to the following:
• Can you use the Internet to access a website, for example, amazon.com?
• Can you use search engines like Google to search for information on the Internet?
• English speaking.
• 6th grade literacy.
• Aged 60 or older.
• TICS-m with a score between 22-37 for MCI and >37 for normal.
• Able to read from a newspaper.

Exclusion criteria

• blindness
• deafness (inability to engage in telephone screening due to hearing difficulties)
• terminal illness
• severe motor impairments (e.g., severe tremors or debilitating arthritis in the hands),
• TICS-m <22.
• All Phase 1 study participants (interview and observational study): have you ever participated in a study that interviewed you about your experience with Medicare or asked you to search for Medicare information?