Research Subproject 1: Project EDUCATE: A Telehealth Education Intervention for Diabetes &Hypertension (PI: Warren, Co-I Smalley, Consultant Fernindez) In this project, we propose a two-phase study designed to manualize and test the effecfiveness of a novel theory and evidence-based telehealth health education intervention, Project EDUCATE (Eliminating Disparities in the Underserved by Centralizing Availability of Telehealth Education), designed to improve outcomes related to hypertension and diabetes among rural populations. Such an Intervention could be easily disseminated across primary care providers that are linked back to a centralized health educator (either within or outside of the provider network), thus minimizing the impact of the lack of trained health educators available in rural settings. The intervention is innovative in its use of multiple telehealth techniques to counteract the barriers rural residents face in receiving health information and behavior-change interventions, and in the close partnership it establishes between the patient's health education experience and their point of care. Phase 1 of the project will collect new information from 500 patients at a regional network of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) regarding barriers to disease management that will help refine and manualize the intervention. Phase 11 of the project will examine the intervention's effectiveness in a sample of 500 FQHC clinic patients using a 12-month randomized controlled crossover design.
