Background: Individuals living in rural communities experience substantial geographic and infrastructure barriers to attaining health equity in accessing tobacco use cessation treatment. Social media and other digital platforms offer promising avenues to improve access and overcome engagement challenges in tobacco cessation efforts. Research has also shown a positive correlation between faith-based involvement and a lower likelihood of smoking, which can be used to engage rural communities in these interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Limited research has examined how technology and digital literacy may affect patients' use of video visits. This study explored the relationship of demographic factors and patient-reported confidence in digital literacy skills to access to video visits among patients who never used them during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: Using existing survey data, the current study examined data from respondents who did not engage in video appointments but instead attended face-to-face appointments between April and December 2020 for nonemergent health concerns.
Sexual health concerns are one of the most common late effects facing hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) survivors. The current study tested whether self-reported depression and anxiety symptoms before transplant were associated with embedded items assessing two specific areas of sexual health-sexual interest and sexual satisfaction-one year post-HSCT. Of the 158 study participants, 41% were diagnosed with a plasma cell disorder (n = 60) and most received autologous transplantation (n = 128; 81%).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: During the COVID-19 outbreak, video appointments became a popular method for health care delivery, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic. Although Mayo Clinic aimed to reduce face-to-face (F2F) appointments to prevent the spread of the virus, some patients continued seeing their health care providers in person. In the later stages of the pandemic, many patients became comfortable with video appointments, even if they were initially hesitant.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Tobacco smoking remains the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the United States, with significant rural-urban disparities. Adults who live in rural areas of the United States have among the highest tobacco smoking rates in the nation and experience a higher prevalence of smoking-related deaths and deaths due to chronic diseases for which smoking is a causal risk factor. Barriers to accessing tobacco use cessation treatments are a major contributing factor to these disparities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the United States is high, with at least 63 million unvaccinated individuals to date. Socioeconomically disadvantaged populations experience lower COVID-19 vaccination rates despite facing a disproportionate COVID-19 burden.
Objective: To assess the factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among under-resourced, adult patients.
COVID-19 has widened the existing digital divide, especially for people from socially and economically deprived communities. We describe a program evaluation using a community participatory approach to develop self-reported items of patient experience with technology inclusive of digital access and literacy. The feedback received from Community Advisory Boards and Community Engagement Studio members led to the evaluation and refinement of the individual items.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Cigarette smoking prevalence is higher among rural compared with urban adults, yet access to cessation programming is reduced. The Increasing Digital Equity and Access (IDEA) study aims to evaluate three digital access and literacy interventions for promoting engagement with an online evidence-based smoking cessation treatment (EBCT) program among rural adults.
Methods: The pilot trial will use a pragmatic, three-arm, randomized, parallel-group design with participants recruited from a Midwest community-based health system in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, to prevent the spread of the virus, federal regulatory barriers around telemedicine were lifted, and health care institutions encouraged patients to use telemedicine, including video appointments. Many patients, however, still chose face-2-face (f2f) appointments for nonemergent clinical care.
Objective: We explored patients' personal and environmental barriers to the use of video appointments from April 2020 to December 2020.
Background: Community engagement can make a substantial difference in health outcomes and strengthen the capacity to deal with disruptive public health events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media platforms such as Facebook are a promising avenue to reach the broader public and enhance access to clinical and translational science, and require further evaluation from the scientific community.
Objective: This study aims to describe the use of live community events to enhance communication about clinical and health research through a Facebook platform case study (Minnesota [MN] Research Link) with a Minnesota statewide community.
Introduction: To assess researchers' experiences working with community advisory boards (CABs) and perceptions of how community member stakeholder feedback impacted the research.
Methods: Individual interviews were conducted with researchers (= 34) who had presented their research to a Mayo Clinic CAB (at MN, AZ, or FL) from 2014 to 2017, with an average interview duration of 10-15 min. Researchers were asked "In what ways did the feedback you received from the CAB influence your research?" A validated, structured, 7-item interview was used to assess domains of the potential influence that CABs had on the research: (1) pre-research (e.
Youth are an understudied population requiring additional safeguards when participating in research. Their input is necessary to facilitate participation and interest in studies. To address this, Mayo Clinic established one of the first pediatric advisory boards (PAB) comprised of 18 diverse youth aged 11-17.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Community engagement is important for advancing Clinical and Translational Science (CTS), but face-to-face engagement has limited reach and scale. We examined the feasibility of a novel virtual Facebook community platform for public engagement on health research statewide in Minnesota.
Methods: The Facebook platform, , was evaluated from June 19, 2019 to June 30, 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected underserved and minority populations in the United States. This is partially attributable to limited access to diagnostic testing from deeply rooted structural inequities precipitating higher infection and mortality rates. We describe the process of establishing a drive-through collection site by leveraging an academic-community partnership between a medical institution and a federally qualified health center in Minnesota.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Recruiting participants into clinical trials continues to be a challenge, which can result in study delay or termination. Recent studies have used social media to enhance recruitment outcomes. An assessment of the literature on the use of social media for this purpose is required.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren and adolescents from minority and low income backgrounds face social and environmental challenges to engaging in physical activity and healthy eating to maintain a healthy weight. In this study, we present pilot work to develop and implement a multi-component physical activity and healthy eating intervention at a Boys & Girls Club (BGC) afterschool program. Using a community-based participatory approach, BGC staff and academic researchers developed intervention components informed by formative studies and based on a Social Ecological Theory framework.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver 80% of CTSA programs have a community advisory board (CAB). Little is known about how research discussed with CABs aligns with community priorities (bidirectionality). This program evaluation assessed researcher presentations from 2014 to 2018 to the CABs linked to our CTSA at all three sites (Minnesota, Arizona, and Florida) for relevance to local community needs identified in 2013 and/or 2016.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: News media play an important role in raising public awareness, framing public opinions, affecting policy formulation, and acknowledgment of public health issues. Traditional qualitative content analysis for news sentiments and focuses are time-consuming and may not efficiently convey sentiments nor the focuses of news media.
Methods: We used descriptive statistics and state-of-art text mining to conduct sentiment analysis and topic modeling, to efficiently analyze over 3 million Reuters news articles during 2007-2017 for identifying their coverage, sentiments, and focuses for public health issues.
Background: Almost 80% of adolescents do not achieve 60 minutes or more of physical activity each day as recommended by current US national guidelines. There is a need to develop and promote interventions that increase physical activity among adolescents. With increased interest in digital technologies among adolescents, robotic-assisted platforms are a novel and engaging strategy to deliver physical activity interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Researchers have explored using the internet and social media to recruit participants to specific research projects. Less systematic work has been done to inform the engagement of large populations in virtual communities to advance clinical and translational science. We report on our first step to use social media to engage Minnesota residents by studying the willingness of participants to engage in a virtual (Facebook) community about the concepts of health and health-related research.
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