Pandemic Doesn’t Stop Innovative Study on Managing High Blood Pressure

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The JHU Center for Health Equity’s RICH LIFE (Reducing Inequities in Care of Hypertension: Lifestyle Improvement for Everyone) Project is studying new approaches to taking care of  high blood pressure patients. Despite the many challenges of doing research during a pandemic, the project made great progress in 2020.

BACKGROUND

We launched the RICH LIFE Project in 2015. The study tests an approach for treating high blood pressure that considers a patient’s background, income and residence in the creation of treatment plans. The study is testing whether this new approach will do as well as traditional treatment methods. The study involves 1822 participants from 30 medical offices across Maryland and Pennsylvania. The participants are divided into two groups. One group uses the standard doctor’s office-based care. The other group uses an approach that uses both medical office staff and Community Health Workers (CHWs) to provide patient care.

PROGRESS ACHIEVED TO DATE

Although the COVID-19 crisis forced us to make some changes, we were able to continue our research and to care for people.  RICH LIFE Care Managers and Community Health Workers were able to stay in touch with patients throughout 2020 via telephone and video chats.  We are so thankful to have had the chance to partner with such great Care Managers and Community Health Workers!  None of us could have guessed what 2020 would bring, and we are humbled by the flexibility and dedication our team showed during this difficult year. 

We are lucky that we were able to continue collecting data during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Our data collectors are working hard from home to complete patient surveys.  We have completed follow up surveys with more than 80% of the patients in the study. This puts us above our goal for follow-up surveys! 

In addition to the standard RICH LIFE follow-up surveys, our researchers have been sending a new survey to the patients.  The goal of this survey is to learn what effects the COVID-19 pandemic had on family stress, financial and mental health, and care of chronic disease.  We hope to collect over 500 surveys by the end of February 2021.

Community patient advocate Ms. Willie McNair (above) shares her experience with the RICH LIFE Project during our first Town Hall meeting.

Community patient advocate Ms. Willie McNair (above) shares her experience with the RICH LIFE Project during our first Town Hall meeting.

With the RICH LIFE Project finishing, the team has started sharing the early conclusions. This fall, we hosted two virtual “End-of-Study Town Halls” with the Center for Health Equity Community Advisory Board and key RICH LIFE stakeholders. These Town Halls provided RICH LIFE patients and caregivers a chance to reflect upon and share what happened during the project. The research team also shared some of the data and lessons learned during the study at these events. If you are interested in learning more about these Town Halls, please visit our YouTube channel.

We are also excited to announce that the journal Ethnicity and Disease has accepted two RICH LIFE articles for publication! The first, Social Determinants of Health as Potential Influencers of a Collaborative Care Intervention for Patients with Hypertension can be accessed here. We will provide the link to the second article in our next update.

We announced in our last update that the American Heart Journal accepted a paper about the design of the RICH LIFE study, and that paper has been published! Please email RICH LIFE Study lead researcher Katie Dietz at kdietz4@jhmi.edu if you would like to request a copy of the article. [Note: it might be possible to download the article and convert it into a PDF for sharing, although you may need to request permission to do so]

The RICH LIFE team continues to rise above the challenges of the pandemic thanks to our amazing partners, patients, and research team. We are looking forward to 2021, but we are truly grateful for all we were able to accomplish in 2020!

Baltimore, RICHLifeCHE Team