Salud al Día: Engaging Latino Parents in Pediatric Primary Care

Lessons learned in organizational engagement reveal a critical need to increase healthcare engagement among LEP Latino parents. LEP Latina mothers who were founding members of Latino Family Advisory Board (LFAB) at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center identified the health system knowledge that enabled participants to more effectively use the healthcare system as one of the key benefits of board membership. The gains in knowledge, skills, and confidence demonstrated in the LFAB evaluation mirror qualitative evaluation findings of other ambulatory care advisory boards, and reflect the concept of patient activation. Patient activation, a component of individual patient engagement, is defined as the patient's willingness to manage their health and healthcare based on understanding one's role in the care process and having the knowledge, skills, and confidence to do so. Interventions focused on increasing activation, using both in-person and mHealth support, have demonstrated efficacy and have led to improvement in health and healthcare quality. mHealth-based interventions have the ability to reach larger populations at lower cost, with the potential for increased tailoring and interactivity, especially as the use of cellular phones becomes nearly universal, even among low-income populations. For example, Text4baby, a perinatal health education program delivered through passive educational text messages, has demonstrated success at reaching low-income Spanish-speaking parents with positive user assessments.

A recent study of parent healthcare activation among low-income parents (conducted by PI: DeCamp) demonstrated that parent activation among parents whose preferred healthcare language was Spanish was significantly lower than that of parents whose preferred healthcare language was English. These findings further support targeting increasing the healthcare engagement of LEP Latino parents.

This novel intervention will integrate mobile health (mHealth) technology and culturally- and linguistically-tailored interpersonal support to increase healthcare engagement of LEP Latino parents and to enable participants to overcome barriers to effective healthcare access and use. Investigators hypothesize that this intervention will measurably increase parent healthcare engagement and that this will positively impact healthcare utilization, quality and the patient/family experience. Increasing healthcare engagement of LEP Latino families and demonstrating positive healthcare impact through a tailored, scalable intervention would create a foundation for larger-scale impact on healthcare disparities for Latino children and a model for increasing engagement of other vulnerable populations.