Health IT, Patient Engagement

Facebook reminders help teens control asthma

Preliminary results of a study at Boston's Partners HealthCare among teenagers with asthma found significant improvement in engagement and in symptom control when patients received reminders and encouragement from clinicians and peers via Facebook.

Once again, social media proves its mettle among young people with health issues. Preliminary results of a study of asthmatic teenagers at Boston’s Partners HealthCare found significant improvement in engagement and in symptom control when patients received reminders and encouragement from clinicians and peers via Facebook.

Dr. Joseph Kvedar, vice president of connected health at Partners HealthCare, presented these early findings at the mHealth + Telehealth World conference in Boston this week. Kvedar told MedCity News that Partners is working on publication of the study in a peer-reviewed journal.

Partners Connected Health, formerly known as the Center for Connected Health, teamed up with the Department of Pulmonology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the pediatric asthma group at Partners Community HealthCare to create a private Facebook group for asthma patients aged 14-17. Partners paired the “secret” group, only viewable by invited users and not listed in Facebook search results, with a password-protected website called Connect 2 My ACT, where study participants could take the Asthma Control Test (ACT), a survey intended to measure asthma control.

Clinicians and researchers sent monthly reminders — with links to Connect 2 My Act — as well as occasional educational information to each member of the Facebook group. The alerts would show up just like any other Facebook notification, making the reminders easy to access.

After 12 months, Partners Connected Health achieved 79 percent “engagement” with the approximately 125 teens in the study group, compared to the typical rate of just 18 percent, according to Kvedar. Engagement with the ACT is defined as taking the survey at least once per month for a year.

Patients reported a mean ACT score of 21 on a scale of 25, an improvement of 1.47 points over a control group. Anything less than 20 indicates problems with asthma control, so the interventions actually put the average study participant into the good range. A score of 14 or lower is considered critical and, in this trial, prompted notifications to pulmonary specialists, who could then personally intervene with at-risk patients.

Kvedar discussed the findings in context of a keynote session on the role of consumer-generated data in “next-generation” care delivery. He said that patient-generated information is particularly useful for chronic “silent killer” conditions like diabetes, hypertension and asthma, where poor disease control could cause lasting damage, hospitalizations or even premature death.

Kvedar showed a pie chart comparing the amount of time patients spend in hospitals, in clinics and everywhere else. Obviously, the latter category took up most of the pie. “Why is it we persist that that data gathered in those two little slivers is adequate [for assessing overall health]?” Kvedar wondered.

Photo: Bigstock

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