Dynamically Tailored Behavioral Interventions in Diabetes

Overview

In this project, the investigators will evaluate the efficacy of a novel approach to personalizing behavioral interventions for self-management of type 2 diabetes (T2DM) to individuals' behavioral and glycemic profiles discovered using computational learning and self-monitoring data. This study is a two-arm randomized controlled trial with n=280 participants recruited from the participating Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). The participants will be randomly assigned to the intervention group and the usual care (control) group with 1-1 allocation ratio. Half of the participants (n=140) will be randomly assigned to a usual care (control) group. Both groups will receive standard diabetes education at their respective FQHC site. In addition, the experimental group will receive instructions to use T2.coach for a minimum of 6 months.

One of the main difficulties in managing diabetes is that each affected individual requires personally tailored combination of diet, exercise, and medication to effectively control their blood sugar. Rather than strictly following a doctor's prescription, individuals need to carefully examine their lifestyle choices and their impact on their health. Independent learning, experimentation and problem solving become of great importance. However, they can be challenging for individuals with diabetes. In this project, the investigators will refine and evaluate a novel intervention for diabetes self-management that uses computational analysis of self-monitoring data to help individuals with type 2 diabetes identify what daily activities, including consumption of meals, physical activity, and sleep, have impact on blood glucose levels, and suggest modifications to these daily activities to improve blood glucose levels. Growing evidence highlights significant differences in glycemic function and cultural, social, and economical circumstances of individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) that impact their self-management. Precision medicine strives to personalize medical treatment to an individual's genetic makeup, computationally discovered clinical phenotypes and lifestyle. Studies showed the benefits of tailoring not only medical treatment, but also behavioral interventions. Yet, currently, personalization of self-management in T2DM requires each individual to engage in discovery, reflection, and problem-solving-critical but cognitively demanding activities-or to rely on their healthcare providers. Both of these may present considerable barriers to individuals from medically under-served low income communities. Mobile health (mHealth) solutions in T2DM bring promise of reaching wider populations in need of self-management; however, few such solutions provide assistance with personalizing self-management behaviors. Ongoing efforts on personalizing behavioral interventions outside of T2DM focus on tailoring behavior modification techniques to individuals' psycho-social characteristics, such as self-efficacy ), and tailoring delivery of intervention to individuals' context rather than on personalizing self-management strategies. The ongoing focus of this research is on developing informatics interventions for diabetes self-management, with a specific focus on discovery with self-monitoring data and on problem-solving for improving glycemic control. In the proposed research the investigators introduce T2.coach, an mHealth intervention that uses computational analysis of self-monitoring data to identify behavioral patterns associated with poor glycemic control and formulate personalized behavioral goals for changing problematic behaviors. This study will evaluate T2.coach's efficacy in a two-arm RCT with stratified randomization conducted with Clinical Directors Network (CDN), a well-recognized primary care practice-based research network (PBRN) of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)-designated Center of Excellence (P30) for Practice-based Research and Learning.