Effectiveness of a personalized health profile on specificity of self-management goals among people living with HIV in Canada: a protocol for a blinded pragmatic randomized controlled trial

Abstract

Background: Goal setting is a crucial element in self-management of chronic diseases. Personalized outcome feedback is needed for goal setting, a requirement for behavior change. This study contributes to the understanding of the specificity of patient-formulated self-management goals by testing the effectiveness of a personalized health outcome profile. Objective: To estimate among people living with HIV, to what extent providing feedback on their health outcomes, compared to no feedback, will affect number and specificity of patient-formulated self-management goals. Methods: A personalized health outcome profile has been produced for individuals enrolled in a Canadian HIV Brain Health Now cohort study at cohort entry and at the last recorded visit. Participants will be randomized to receive or not “My Personal Brain Health Dashboard” prior to a goal setting exercise. Self-defined goals in free text will be collected through an online platform. Intervention and control groups will receive instructions on goal setting and tips to improve brain health. A total of 420 participants are needed to detect a rate ratio (number of specific words/numbers of person-goals, intervention:control) of 1.5. Text mining techniques will be used to quantify goal specificity based on word matches with a goal-setting lexicon. The expectation is that the intervention group will set more goals and have more words matching the developed lexical than the control group. The total number of words per person-goals will be calculated for each group and Poisson regression will be used to estimate the rate ratio and 95% confidence intervals and compare rate ratios between men and women using an interaction term. Conclusions: This study will contribute to growing evidence for the value of person-reported health outcomes in tailoring interventions, and will provide a thorough understanding of the quality of person-defined goals using text mining. Trial registration: Clinical Trials NCT04175795 , registered on 25 th November 2019.