RICH LIFE Study Wrapping Up Six Years of Work
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.
BACKGROUND
Johns Hopkins University 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 patients from 30 medical offices across Maryland and Pennsylvania. The patients are divided into two groups. One group uses the traditional doctor’s office-based care. The other group uses an approach that uses 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 and happy to report that the study is entering into its last stages! After six years of work and countless hours of effort, we are getting close to having our final results.
Our researchers were hard at work calling patients to complete surveys about their experience in the study and finished those calls on August 31, 2021.
Our team continues to work with our partner, i2i Population Health, to retrieve electronic medical record information on the study participants. Once we have collected all of the information, we will be able to see what effect the RICH LIFE Project had on patients’ health.
It is very exciting to be at the point where we will soon learn the results of this ground-breaking study! We look forward to working with our partners to share the results. We have already shared some early lessons learned with the Center for Health Equity Community Advisory Board and key RICH LIFE stakeholders, and you can see that information on our YouTube channel.
In our last update, we reported that the journal Ethnicity and Disease accepted two RICH LIFE articles for publication. The first paper, “Social Determinants of Health as Potential Influencers of a Collaborative Care Intervention for Patients with Hypertension” can be found here. The second paper, “Association of Perceived Stress and Discrimination on Medication Adherence among Diverse Patients with Uncontrolled Hypertension,” can be found here. Additionally, the American Heart Journal published a paper about the design of the RICH LIFE Project. Please email Katie Dietz at kdietz4@jhmi.edu if you would like a copy of the article. We are working on more papers and hope to share 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. We could not have reached this point in the study without them.
RESOURCES
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity YouTube Channel
The American Heart Journal published a paper about the design of the RICH LIFE Project. Please email Katie Dietz at kdietz4@jhmi.edu if you would like a copy of the article.