Dr. Patricia Franklin of UMass Medical Center in Worcester, MA is the Principal Investigator on the project Using Tailored Emails to Motivate Healthy Behavior, Improve Health Status, & Reduce Health Care Costs in Employee Populations: A Randomized Trial.

What is unique and/or innovative about your study?
The use of sequential e-mails to deliver primary prevention information, motivation and self-care tools to the adult employee population is innovative. Public health programs have not used general e-mail messaging, to our knowledge, to deliver physical activity and diet messages to US adults. We are delivering the messages to employees in the workplace to assure uniform access to e-mail. If sequential e-mails prove to be effective in facilitating the adoption of healthy behaviors among employees, an e-mail program could offer a broad reach, relatively low cost mechanism to assist in achieving the Healthy People 2010 goals.

How is your project progressing so far?
We are very pleased with the broad interest in the project. More than 20 central New York worksites (and 1500 employees) have agreed to participate in the study’s pilot and randomized trial of an e-mail primary prevention program.

What prompted you to explore this research?
The research team members are committed to improving the healthy behaviors of our community. I am trained in Preventive Medicine and health services research and had experience using computer technology within the medical setting to change behavior and was interested in extrapolating this “outcome improvement” work to prevent illness. The Co-Principal Investigator is the lead scientific developer for the RealAge.com Web site. People who used the Web site report adopting healthy behaviors. Together with our team of experts in health psychology, epidemiology and information technology, we were interested in testing the adaptation of the RealAge Web site and e-mails for use by the general adult population to improve healthy behaviors.

How would a typical end-user utilize the final product/results of your research?
We expect that employers will learn how to use an e-mail-delivered health promotion program to enhance healthy behaviors among employees. If effective, we can anticipate broader use of the model in public health - when the general population has access to Web and e-mail technology.

What are the greatest challenges in eHealth and more specifically, your project?
The variation in computer hardware, Web-access software and Web-technologies across workplaces has offered the greatest challenge for collecting information from employees and delivering all Web tools across worksites.

In what ways would you like to see eHealth evolve?
There is great potential to individualize and efficiently deliver health information and self-care tools via the Internet. The next generation is being educated with computers and will be comfortable with the technology. Health care needs to anticipate the health needs of chronic illness and adapt eHealth tools to better serve patients.

How do you stay informed of advances and innovations in eHealth?
The field is fundamentally inter-disciplinary from IT experts to clinician and patient users. Thus, I follow an array of medical literature and Web sites.

Patricia – best of luck with your project! We appreciate the update.

Dr. Tami Mark of The MedStat Group will be featured in the next edition of Meet the Grantees.