Baylor Professor to Use Telehealth to Help Counsel Young Women At Risk

A Baylor University researcher is launching a federally funded project that will use telehealth and mHealth to improve risk reduction education for young women.

Danielle Parrish, PhD, a professor in the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work, is using a $3.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how connected health can be integrated into a program that helps women between the ages of 14-17 avoid risky behaviors. The program targets young women who’ve been referred by the local juvenile justice system, a population 3.5 times more likely to become pregnant and 30 percent of which have already been pregnant, as well as one that’s much more likely to use drugs and alcohol.

"I think it's important that it is clear that this is a very high-risk, underserved population," Parrish said in a press release. "We just haven't made many gains in offering services that are empirically supported that actually improve the wellbeing of these young women and their health. Our short-term goals will be to look at the outcomes of the intervention to see if it's efficacious."

The program, called CHOICES-TEEN: Efficacy of a Bundled Risk Reduction Intervention for Juvenile Justice Females, schedules four sessions in which selected participants meet with a Master’s-level clinician and a doctor specializing in adolescent care, both of which have training in motivational interviewing. The first session is in person, while the others are via telehealth, and paired with access through an mHealth app.

CHOICES-TEEN builds off of the national CHOICES program, launched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to address alcohol-exposed pregnancies.

The program is one of many surfacing across the country that uses connected health channels to address gaps in care in underserved populations, particularly those at risk. Those gaps are often caused by access issues – geographical, economic or cultural – as well as a lack of services that specifically target that population.

For example, the local community health or primary care physician may not have the expertise to address the concerns of young women 14-17 years old, or those resources might be too generic and therefore ineffective. But a telehealth platform can give local care providers virtual access to specialists who can provide those services.

Parrish said she envisions her program being adopted in any number of settings.

"With this particular intervention — in addition to looking at multiple health risk behaviors at once — we will add a hybrid telehealth aspect to the intervention, which I think can have some major implications for learning about increasing the feasibility of service delivery for a population that might be typically inaccessible because of transportation or living in a rural area," she said in the release.

"My hope is that it would be rolled out into settings where a young woman might be coming into contact with the juvenile justice system and diverted into the community setting or on community probation,” she added. “They could be reached through these settings because we know this population is at risk, but I think this prevention approach could also be translated into other settings like teen health clinics or services provided in partnership with Child Protective Services.”