Digital Tools to Support Healthcare Decision Making
Purpose
The goal for this project is to support the cognitive components of older adults' health-management activities through development of digital assistant technology tools tailored to three exemplar healthcare management task activities: accessing support services, managing healthcare finances, and using the health-management tools provided by Medicare.gov. This project will leverage the machine-intelligence expertise of our collaborators and our experience in developing and evaluating technologies for supporting the health and wellbeing needs of older adults to harness technology to provide cognitive support to aging adults, including those with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and lower SES.
Condition
- Mild Cognitive Impairment
Eligibility
- Eligible Ages
- Over 60 Years
- Eligible Sex
- All
- Accepts Healthy Volunteers
- Yes
Inclusion Criteria
- Some internet proficiency is required; participants will need to answer Yes to the following: - Can you use the Internet to access a website, for example, amazon.com? - Can you use search engines like Google to search for information on the Internet? - English speaking. - 6th grade literacy. - Aged 60 or older. - TICS-m with a score between 22-37 for MCI and >37 for normal. - Able to read from a newspaper.
Exclusion Criteria
- blindness - deafness (inability to engage in telephone screening due to hearing difficulties) - terminal illness - severe motor impairments (e.g., severe tremors or debilitating arthritis in the hands), - TICS-m <22. - All Phase 1 study participants (interview and observational study): have you ever participated in a study that interviewed you about your experience with Medicare or asked you to search for Medicare information?
Study Design
- Phase
- N/A
- Study Type
- Interventional
- Allocation
- Randomized
- Intervention Model
- Parallel Assignment
- Primary Purpose
- Treatment
- Masking
- Triple (Participant, Investigator, Outcomes Assessor)
Arm Groups
| Arm | Description | Assigned Intervention |
|---|---|---|
|
Experimental Sidekick Condition |
Participants will be given a brief introduction to Large Language Models, how they can be used to solve queries, and introduced to Sidekick. Some simple example queries will be used to demonstrate its use, how to construct prompts, and to illustrate the nature of Sidekick's responses. Participants will also be instructed about different degrees of specificity of information and other customization features of Sidekick and how to use responses as a springboard for iterative prompting (sequential queries). |
|
|
Active Comparator Usual-Tool Control Condition |
Participants will be asked to open the medicare.gov website. They will be shown the basic structure of the homepage and the distinctions between tabs on the website. Examples of information that can be obtained from these different tabs will be demonstrated. Navigation between different parts of the website will also be demonstrated. |
|
Recruiting Locations
Champaign, Illinois 61820
New York, New York 10065
More Details
- Status
- Recruiting
- Sponsor
- Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Detailed Description
The overarching goal of the project is to enable diverse older adults, including those of lower SES or with cognitive impairments (e.g., MCI), to achieve their health goals by supporting the cognitive components of health-management activities, through development of digital assistant technology tools. Tool development will be guided by an understanding of the preferences, needs, and cognitive capabilities and limitations of older adults. Each of the CREATE sites will lead efforts. CREATE resources will be used to maximal potential through utilization of the machine learning and artificial intelligence expertise of our partners at the WCM site for support of the development of digital assistant technology tools for medicare. Importantly, data collection related to development and evaluation of the tools for each of the task activities will occur at all sites to maximize the design of the cognitive support tools and the generalizability of the findings. Clinical Trial, the primary objective is focused on evaluating the feasibility, acceptability and usability of the SideKick digital support tool (adapted for this study for Medicare) with a diverse sample of adults age 60+ with and without a cognitive impairment. This is a feasibility trial. The study design is a pilot RCT. Following a baseline assessment, participants will be randomized into a Medicare.gov Condition or the SideKick condition. Participants will complete a series of queries related to Medicare enrollment and plan selection (that vary in complexity) using medicare.gov or Sidekick. Their performance and perceptions (e.g., challenges, usability, usefulness, etc.) will be evaluated upon completion of the queries. This clinical trial was originally registered as part of NCT05811338.