Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Feb 2, 2021
Date Accepted: Jun 14, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 21, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Overcoming the Digital Divide in the post-COVID “Reset”: Enhancing Group Virtual Visits with Community Health Workers
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic created numerous barriers to implement participant-facing research. For most, the pandemic required quickly transitioning to all virtual platforms. Like clinical care in the pandemic, our most vulnerable populations are at highest risk of falling through the cracks of engagement in research. Yet, we argue that we should reframe the discussion to consider how this transition may create opportunities to engage hard to reach populations. In the following, we present our experience in Atlanta, GA, transitioning a group visit model for South Asian immigrants to a virtual platform and the pivotal role community members in the form of community health workers (CHWs) can play in building capacity among participants. We provide details on how this model helped address common barriers to group visit models in clinical practice and how our CHW team innovatively addressed the digital challenges of working with an elderly population with limited English proficiency.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.