1 Department of Public Health Education, University of North Carolina Greensboro , Greensboro, North Carolina.
2 Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy, Wake Forest University School of Medicine , Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
AIDS Patient Care STDS. 2018 Nov;32(11):450-458. doi: 10.1089/apc.2018.0060.
Young racial/ethnic minority men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women with HIV often have poor health outcomes. They also utilize a wide array of social media. Accordingly, we developed and implemented weCare, a social media intervention utilizing Facebook, texting, and GPS-based mobile social and sexual networking applications to improve HIV-related care engagement and health outcomes. We compared viral load suppression and clinic appointment attendance among 91 participants during the 12-month period before and after weCare implementation. McNemar's chi-square test analyses were conducted comparing the pre- and postintervention difference using paired data. Since February 2016, intervention staff and 91 intervention participants (79.1% African American and 13.2% Latino, mean age = 25) exchanged 13,830 messages during 3,758 conversations (average: 41.3 conversations per participant) across a variety of topics, including appointment reminders, medication adherence, problem solving, and reducing barriers. There were significant reductions in missed HIV care appointments (68.0% vs. 53.3%, p = 0.04) and increases in viral load suppression (61.3% vs. 88.8%, p < 0.0001) 12 months postimplementation. Our results highlight the initial success of weCare in improving care engagement and viral suppression. Social media is an important tool, especially for young MSM and transgender women, to support individual- (e.g., viral suppression) and community- (e.g., reduced transmission efficiency) level health. It may also be a useful tool for improving engagement with biomedical HIV prevention tools (e.g., PrEP use).
年轻的种族/族裔少数群体男男性行为者和感染艾滋病毒的跨性别女性，其健康状况往往较差。他们也广泛使用各种社交媒体。因此，我们开发并实施了 weCare，这是一种利用 Facebook、短信以及基于 GPS 的移动社交和性网络应用程序来改善与艾滋病毒相关的护理参与和健康结果的社交媒体干预措施。我们比较了 91 名参与者在 weCare 实施前后 12 个月内的病毒载量抑制和就诊预约情况。采用配对数据比较了 McNemar 的卡方检验分析干预前后的差异。自 2016 年 2 月以来，干预工作人员和 91 名干预参与者（79.1%为非裔美国人，13.2%为拉丁裔，平均年龄为 25 岁）通过各种主题（包括预约提醒、药物依从性、解决问题和减少障碍）交换了 13830 条信息，进行了 3758 次对话（平均每个参与者进行 41.3 次对话）。错过艾滋病毒护理预约的情况显著减少（68.0%比 53.3%，p=0.04），病毒载量抑制率增加（61.3%比 88.8%，p<0.0001）。weCare 在提高护理参与度和病毒抑制方面取得了初步成功。社交媒体是一种重要的工具，特别是对年轻的男男性行为者和跨性别女性来说，它可以支持个人（例如，病毒抑制）和社区（例如，降低传播效率）层面的健康。它也可能是提高生物医学艾滋病毒预防工具（例如 PrEP 使用）参与度的有用工具。
