Flowersmueller0626

Mobile health (mHealth) tools to address the HIV epidemic have proliferated in recent years. Yet when applied to the United States (US) epidemic, which is driven by new HIV infections among men who have sex with men (MSM), it is not clear how mHealth tools fit in the overall portfolio of biobehavioral prevention interventions and clinical services proven to be efficacious. Adolescent and young adult MSM are particularly vulnerable and reducing HIV incidence among this priority population will require substantial levels of uptake of multiple prevention strategies (i.e., HIV testing, condom use, sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and treatment for those with HIV infection). Starting from the premise that adolescents are avid consumers of technology, this paper considers the particular strengths and opportunities of mHealth tools to address HIV prevention and provides examples of mHealth approaches that have been tested or are in development in these areas. Even after mHealth interventions are proven effective, there will be important intervening steps before such tools can be deployed and integrated into existing prevention programs given the diverse landscape of prevention service delivery. We anticipate some of the likely barriers to broad implementation of proven mHealth interventions in the context of the US public health funding and service delivery infrastructure and provide recommendations to increase efforts for future scale-up and dissemination.Multiple intersecting stigmas and discrimination related to sex, gender, HIV, and race/ethnicity may challenge HIV prevention and treatment service utilization, particularly among youth. This scoping review describes recent and ongoing innovative mobile health (mHealth) interventions among youth in the United States that aim to reduce stigma as an outcome or as part of the intervention model. To identify examples of stigma-mitigation via mHealth, we searched peer-reviewed published literature using keyword strategies related to mHealth, HIV, stigma, and youth (ages 10 to 29). We identified eleven articles that met our inclusion criteria, including three describing data from two randomized controlled trials (RCTs), five describing pilot studies, one describing the process evaluation of an ongoing intervention, one describing formative work for intervention development, and one published study protocol for an ongoing intervention. We review these articles, grouped by HIV prevention and care continuum stages, anue advantages to address the complex intersecting stigma barriers along the HIV continuum to improve HIV-related outcomes for youth.The use of technology as a platform for delivering HIV prevention interventions provides an efficient opportunity to reach those at risk for HIV with targeted and timely prevention and treatment messages. Technology-delivered HIV interventions are becoming increasingly popular and include interventions that use mobile text messaging and mobile phone apps or deliver prevention messages through telehealth platforms. compound library chemical Community-centered approaches of intervention development can help address the potential gap between science and practice by ensuring that interventions are appropriate and driven by community needs and desires. Common approaches to gaining community input rely on qualitative data gathered through in-person focus group discussions (FGD), in-depth interviews (IDI) and youth advisory boards (YABs). While these proven methodologies have strengths, youth engagement can be limited by structural barriers (e.g., lack of transportation, inconvenient timing) and reluctance to participate due to stigma or discomfort with group settings. This results in a number of biases that limit the quality of face-to-face qualitative data collection, i.e., social desirability bias or selection biases created by differential likelihood of recruitment and attendance. As an increasing number of HIV prevention and care interventions are successfully delivered online, innovative approaches to youth engagement in virtual spaces can also be applied across the intervention lifespan to increase the quality and validity of formative data. In this paper, we describe a range of qualitative data collection techniques that can be used via online platforms to collect qualitative data, and we outline their relative advantages over face-to-face FGD or IDI. We use four case studies to highlight the methodologies and findings and provide recommendations for researchers moving forward.The incidence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection has been decreasing in the United States overall, except among youth, and in particular among Black and Latinx young men who have sex with men (MSM). In this review we summarize key drivers of the HIV epidemic among youth, as well as novel interventions geared specifically towards combating the epidemic among high-risk populations. Many factors driving the HIV epidemic among youth are related to systemic inequities, including lack of access to healthcare, inadequate education, and internalized and experience homophobia and racism. Developmentally, youth may feel that they are invulnerable and be willing to engage in risks. Moreover, HIV is often invisible for youth given advances in treatment and community stigma, limiting open discussion of risk and new preventive modalities. Outcomes from the HIV treatment cascade suggest that youth are less likely to be aware of their HIV infection status, less likely to link to and be engaged in care, and less erway to better inform the optimal delivery of treatment and prevention services for this complex and diverse population, and include novel sociobiological interventions and new modes of medication delivery that may lend themselves to overcoming obstacles specific to youth.Mobile app health research presents myriad opportunities to improve health, and simultaneously introduces a new set of challenges that are non-intuitive and extend beyond typical training received by researchers. Informed by our experiences with app development for health research, we discuss some of the most salient pitfalls when working with emerging technology as well as potential strategies to avoid or resolve these challenges. To address challenges at the project level, we suggest strategies that researchers can use to future-proof their research, such as using theory and involving those with app development expertise as part of a research team. At the structural level, we include a new model to characterize the relationship between technology- and research-timelines, and provide ideas regarding how to best address this challenge. Given that screen-based time now predominates our lived experiences, it is important that health researchers have the capacity and structural support to develop interventions that utilize these technologies, assess them rigorously, and ensure their timely and equitable dissemination.