Most clinicians who work with children or teenagers already know that the best way to reach them is through a computer screen. As Baby Boomers reach retirement age, this advice now applies to older patients as well. NPs and PAs are seeing more 70-year-olds who spend an hour on Facebook every day, surf the Web, and text with the best of them.
As a result, more clinicians are turning to high-tech devices, such as iPhone apps, video games, and streaming videos, as an effective way to deliver their health promotion messages. Read on to see how providers across the country are tapping into this trend.
Web-Based “Dramas” Promote Safe Sex
Rachel Jones, PhD, RN, FAAN, an associate professor at Rutgers University College of Nursing, hit a roadblock while promoting safe sexual practices with her patients in an urban New Jersey clinic.
“I was seeing these smart, together women and men,” Jones says. “I would talk to them about STDs and HIV, but they were still having unprotected sex.”
Jones realized that the rational, knowledge-based approach to prevention doesn’t really work when it comes to sexual health. “Cognitive-based knowledge is not enough,” she says. “These are intense emotional and relationship issues.”
Once, after having an exam interrupted—yet again!—by a patient taking a cell phone call, Jones realized the phone could be a powerful prevention tool.
She had already been in the midst of making HIV prevention videos, but now will make these compelling dramas available via streaming video on phones with 3G and 4G network service. “We wanted to boost the message between clinic visits, in the comfort of patients’ homes,” Jones says. “We wanted it to be confidential and private.”
To create the story lines for her HIV prevention soap operas, Jones brought real women from the community into the studio for focus groups. As a result, her videos are true to life—and very popular. Once patients watch the first video in the series, called “Toni, Mike, and Valerie,” they get hooked and want to continue watching other episodes to find out what happens to the main characters.
“We have found a lot of women carrying both their own phone and our phone,” says Jones, who with grant money was actually able to purchase compatible cell phones and hand them out to patients. “There’s a high interest in the story—it’s not a hard sell.”
The message is built into the story, but it is woven through in a subtle way. The drama includes what Jones calls low-power and high-power women. The low-power women give in to pressure to have unprotected sex as a way to show they’ll do anything for their man, and they trust him completely. The higher-power women, on the other hand, would never even think of having sex without first asking the man to have an HIV test.
“Those women are our heroines,” Jones says. “Strong, powerful women can serve to mentor other women—that’s really what we’re doing with our shows.” When patients identify with the characters emotionally, they understand the consequences of their behavior, and they start to emulate the stronger women, Jones says.
Jones also made a series called “Love, Sex and Choices.” Jones received grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Health Care Foundation of New Jersey, among other sources, to make her prevention videos. Next, she plans to make a video series for men and to market her videos through social media.
“There is tremendous power in this modality,” Jones says.
Her goal is to change attitudes about condoms, so both women and men see them as a symbol of love and protection. “We could completely eradicate HIV in women by using condoms,” Jones says. She hopes more nurses and physician assistants will embrace this multimedia educational approach as an important prevention tool.
As other providers hear about Jones’ videos, requests for copies of the program on DVD (another option, besides the streaming video that can be accessed via Web-capable cell phones) have been pouring in from all over the United States and overseas. Many practitioners are showing the videos while patients sit in the waiting room. They are available at www.stophiv.newark .rutgers.edu.
“Not everybody can go out and make their own movies,” Jones says. “Our goal is to distribute them widely so we can share them with our fellow clinicians.”
Video Games Help Diabetic Kids
Pediatric diabetes is another hot area for high-tech prevention. Several companies have produced interactive video games that educate kids with type 1 diabetes about insulin shots and avoiding sugary foods.