Leveraging Technology as a Clinician Extender to Screen Culturally Diverse Young Women for Chlamydia

Overview

The purpose of this study is to conduct a quality improvement intervention to improve the ability of health care providers to deliver an important preventive health service (CT screening) in order to meet the goal of universal CT screening for young women age 25 or younger as recommended by the CDC and virtually all major health organizations. This novel approach utilizes a bilingual (English-Spanish) computer kiosk module to deliver education about CT and allow patients to request a CT screening test. This module should significantly increase CT screening among at risk women (18-25yo) attending urgent care clinics and emergency departments.

Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) remains epidemic among sexually young adult and adolescent females especially ethnic minority women. Despite recommendations for at least annual screening of all sexually active women up to age 25, CT screening rates remain low. Most young women do not regularly attend primary care clinics where preventive care such as CT screening should be done; and clinicians lack time and comfort to address CT screening during the context of an urgent care or emergency department visit. This proposed study takes advantage of a "missed opportunity" for screening these at-risk young women for CT when they come in contact with the health care system during an urgent care or emergency department visit. The purpose of this study is to conduct a quality improvement intervention, to improve the ability of health care providers to deliver an important preventive health service (CT screening) in order to meet the goal of universal CT screening recommended by virtually all major health organizations. CT screening should be done as a routine part of health care but currently is not. In this study, we will help providers do what they should already be doing using this novel health care delivery approach. In this study, we created and are evaluating a bilingual (English-Spanish) computer kiosk module to increase CT screening among at risk English and Spanish speaking women (18-25 yo) attending urgent care clinics and emergency departments (ED). This computer technology will be able to conduct many of the steps necessary for CT screening including assessing clients' CT risk and prompting the client and health care professionals for CT urine specimen collection. This study will also examine the extent to which this computer kiosk module intervention use is acceptable and feasible among both English and Spanish speaking young women, and health care professionals who care for them in urgent care and ED settings. This type of intervention to improve CT screening is potentially translatable to a wide variety of health delivery settings as it is not dependent on staff time, motivation or skill to assess sexual history in the busy urgent care setting. This project also supports current recommendations of Healthy People 2010, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and other professional organizations to screen all sexually active young adult females at least annually for CT to address this important public health problem especially among our young ethnic minority women who carry the largest STI disease burden. Early detection through routine CT screening coupled with appropriate treatment of CT infections can eliminate widespread infection and prevent such major reproductive morbidity.