Stock image of Caucasian man looking holding a mobile phone.

Mobile Self-Care Strategies May Improve Health Outcomes for PLWH

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Columbia Nursing magazine.

People living with HIV (PLWH) who used a smartphone app that provided evidence-based self-care strategies demonstrated greater symptom relief and medication adherence than those whose app did not provide such strategies, according to research from Columbia Nursing.

The findings suggest that mobile technology may be an efficient platform for the delivery of information that helps improve health outcomes and reduces health and health care disparities among traditionally underserved racial and ethnic groups, said principal investigator Rebecca Schnall, PhD, the Mary Dickey Lindsay Associate Professor of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

Schnall and colleagues developed a mobile Video Information Provider (mVIP) app to deliver symptom-specific, evidence-based self-care strategies to PLWH. To examine the app’s effectiveness in disseminating these strategies and their effect on health outcomes, researchers randomized 40 PLWH to an intervention group whose app provided 143 self-care strategies for 13 different symptoms, and another 40 to a group whose app did not.

Eligible participants were at least 18 years old, English-speaking, HIV-positive, owned a smartphone or tablet, and experienced at least two of 13 symptoms during the previous week. Nearly half the participants had an annual income of less than $10,000, and 90 percent belonged to a racial or ethnic minority group.

Of the 76 participants who completed the 12-week study, those who received selfcare strategies showed improvement in 12 of 13 symptoms, compared with controls. In five of these symptoms––anxiety; depression; neuropathy; fever, chills, or sweats; and weight loss or wasting––the intervention group exhibited significantly greater improvement than did controls; they also showed significant improvement in antiretroviral therapy adherence.

With advances in HIV treatment, PLWH are living longer, often with adverse symptoms. Self-managing these symptoms can improve health outcomes and quality of life, said Schnall, who based the study on previous research that entailed distributing printed self-care strategies to PLWH, few of whom accessed them. “Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of mobile technology in disseminating and implementing evidence-based strategies,” she said. “The use of mobile technologies at nearly equal rates across racial and ethnic groups supports the use of these tools for bridging some of the current disparities in health care access and health outcomes.”

This study was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and appeared in the January 3, 2018, online edition of AIDS and Behavior.