Digital Tools to Support Healthcare Decision Making

Summary

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.

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.

Eligibility Criteria

Interventions