Dr. Dirk Schroeder is the Principal Investigator on the project entitled Evaluation of the MiDieta (MyDiet) eHealth Portal to Facilitate Improved Diets, Increased Fitness-levels, and Weight-loss Among U.S. Hispanics at HispaniCare (DrTango, Inc) in Roswell, GA.

What is unique and/or innovative about your study?
Our project is unique in its focus on Spanish-dominant Hispanics. We are measuring how interactive eHealth portals can be used to offer linguistically and culturally-personalized dietary assessments and weight-management guidance to Hispanic members of managed care plans.

How is your project progressing so far?
The project is progressing well. In addition to the original collaborating managed care organization (AtlantiCare, NJ), Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida has joined. We have spent much of the past few months identifying additional tools and instruments to measure readiness to change, diet, fitness and weight loss among Hispanics. We have received wonderful encouragement and support from other researchers interested in seeing their approaches adapted for Hispanics.

What prompted you to explore this research?
The disparities in health and care between Hispanics (and other minorities) and the general population is well recognized. We have had great opportunistic success and usage with our Hispanic-directed diet application when delivered through the major Spanish portals (i.e. Univision.com) and hospitals, but wanted to verify these results through a randomized trial and understand more deeply the benefits of a multilingual health portal for both consumers as well as providers.

How would a typical end-user utilize the final product/results of your research?
Healthcare organizations that offer the MiDieta portal will be providing sound and well researched diet, fitness and weight management advice to their patients and members. The portal will also enable individual, non-Spanish-speaking providers (i.e. doctors, nurses, dietitians) to improve their management of Hispanic patients. Consumers that access the MiDieta portal through one of these healthcare entities will benefit from a high degree of personalized guidance, backed by Spanish-speaking dietitians and counselors.

What are the greatest challenges in eHealth and more specifically, your project?
Some of our biggest challenges are not necessarily specific to “eHealth,” but common to all types of attempts at behavior change, e.g. getting people to stay on the program and actually make the changes they indicate they would like to make. Specific to eHealth, although more than 50% of Hispanics are online, there is lower Internet utilization among the less educated and those who may need the benefits of the program the most. To circumvent this, we are developing approaches in which non-Internet users can access the program through mailed scan forms, telephonic interviews and the like. Consumer information is then “up-loaded” to the eHealth portal for development of the personalized program (which can be mailed) and accessed by the individual when they do get online. We look forward to being able to offer a “hybrid” (online/offline) version of MiDieta that brings capabilities of the Internet to people that are not necessary regularly online.

In what ways would you like to see eHealth evolve?
There is no doubt that eHealth will continue to play a greater and greater role in healthcare. The national initiatives to standardize platforms for health records will, of course, accelerate this once it becomes reality. In the meantime, consumers will increasingly leverage the power of the Internet to find and interact with people like them who have information on health topics and issues they need answers to. The explosion of health-related blogs is one reflection of this trend.

How do you stay informed of advances and innovations in eHealth?
We read over a dozen industry eNewsletters per day, stay on topic of the literature, attend and speak at conferences and listen to needs, frustrations and successes of our clients and users.

Dirk, thank you for the interesting update.

Check back in July for an update from Dr. Steve Ross of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.