Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Oct 9, 2024
Date Accepted: Jan 15, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Dissemination and implementation approach to increasing access to local pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) resources with cisgender Black women: A social media marketing campaign with video logs
ABSTRACT
Background:
Cisgender Black women (CBW) account for 2% of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)-eligible people in the United States who use PrEP to prevent HIV. In correlation with low PrEP use, CBW continue to contract HIV more than women from every other racial group. Intervention efforts that can bridge the link between knowing that PrEP prevents HIV and support with access to PrEP are necessary for CBW.
Objective:
The purpose of the vlogs through the campaign was to share information about ways to prevent HIV using PrEP and fact-based education, and provide access to PrEP resources with active links to local PrEP providers at local community health centers.
Methods:
In Phase I, the study team formerly piloted full-length video blog posts (vlogs) (10-12 minutes each) with 26 women during an emergency department visit. Using the findings from Phase 1, Phase 2 involved a prospective 6-month social media marketing campaign, the study team led a Texas-Development CFAR (TX-DCFAR) funded pilot grant to disseminate brief vlog snippets (30 seconds) of excerpts from the full-length vlogs with a larger group of Black women in Harris County. Community members, who were aged 18 -55 years, usually consume content that is often viewed by CBW (i.e. health/beauty), and reside in neighborhoods (based on zip code) in Harris County where most residents are Black or African American, were shown a series of brief vlog snippets on their social media pages, along with a brief message about PrEP and an active hyperlink to local PrEP resources. The study team was assessed implementation outcomes including feasibility and acceptability, appropriateness of vlogs, adoption of PrEP resources at local clinics, and clinical outcomes such as increased PrEP awareness among CBW.
Results:
Within 6 months, the campaign reached 110.8K unique individuals who identify as women when stratified by age, video plays at 50% of the vlogs (n=30,877) were most common among women ages 18-24 years (n=12,017) and least common among women ages 45-54 years (n=658). Key performance indicators showed that 1,098,629 impressions and1,002,244 total video plays resulted in 15,952 link clicks to local PrEP resources.
Conclusions:
The campaign demonstrated feasibility and acceptability of this approach with CBW and illustrated preliminary effectiveness at supporting access to local PrEP resources with CBW. Further dissemination and implementation of this approach is necessary to fully assess whether vlog viewership and clicks on links to PrEP resources can meaningfully empower CBW to access to PrEP and/or help them to assess whether PrEP is personally a useful HIV prevention option. Clinical Trial: N/A
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