Intervention to Improve Quality of Life for African-AmericaN Lupus Patients (IQAN)

The goal of the proposed project is to enhance the Principal Investigator's research ability to conduct behavioral interventions for people with lupus. This includes intervention design, implementation, data collection and data analysis. The Intervention to Improve Quality of life for African-AmericaN lupus patients (IQAN) Project is designed to examine whether a uniquely tailored intervention program can improve quality of life, decrease indicators of depression, and reduce perceived and biological indicators of stress in African American lupus patients. This study builds on three decades of work conducted in the field of arthritis self-management but differs in that the intervention mode, the disease (lupus), and the study population (African-Americans) are unstudied or understudied. The IQAN Project will use the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) model as its theoretical framework. This program has three specific aims. The first aim seeks to design a three armed randomized, wait list controlled trial that employs a patient-centered 'a-la-carte' approach that offers subjects a variety of modes of interaction, allowing them to choose as many or few as they wish. The second aim is to assess the intervention, using the RE-AIM model framework. The third aim, to be achieved before the first aim, is to use previously collected data to characterize patient-centric barriers to care in African-American lupus patients, in order to identify trends in patient needs and desires, as well as correlates of non-response and non-compliance that can be used in the development and refinement of the intervention.