2022 Update on the RICH LIFE Project

The JHU Center for Health Equity’s RICH LIFE (Reducing Inequities in Care of Hypertension: Lifestyle Improvement for Everyone) Project studied new approaches to taking care of high blood pressure patients.

BACKGROUND

Johns Hopkins University launched the RICH LIFE Project in 2015. The study tested an approach for treating high blood pressure that considered a patient’s background, income and residence in the creation of treatment plans. The study tested whether this new approach would do as well as traditional treatment methods.

The study involved 1820 patients from 30 medical offices across Maryland and Pennsylvania. The patients were divided into two groups. One group used the traditional doctor’s office-based care. The other group used an approach that used both medical office staff as well as other helpers called “Community Health Workers” to care for patients in their homes.

PROGRESS

The RICH LIFE team is proud to report that we successfully completed the project!  After seven years of work and countless hours of effort, we received the final set of data from health system partners and recently finished the data analysis to see what effect the RICH LIFE Project had on patients’ blood pressure.

We are very excited to have the results of this ground-breaking study and have already begun to work with our Center for Health Equity Community Advisory Board and key RICH LIFE stakeholders to share the results! As previously mentioned in our last update, we also shared some early lessons learned with our partners, and you can see that information on our YouTube channel.  Most recently, Dr. Cooper presented our results in a late-breaking science session at the American Heart Association (AHA) Meeting in Chicago in November 2022.

Though the RICH LIFE Project has ended, our team continues to work on remaining papers and looks forward to sharing more publications in upcoming updates.

As always, we are so grateful for all of our partners, participants, and research team members for their on-going support of the RICH LIFE Project.  Our efforts to report on the outcomes have just begun and we look forward to sharing more in the coming months!