Dissemination and Implementation Approach to Increasing Access to Local Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Resources...

Black cisgender women account for only 2% of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)-eligible people in the United States who use PrEP to prevent HIV. Owing to the low PrEP use, Black cisgender women continue to contract HIV more frequently than women from every other racial group. Intervention efforts that can bridge the link between knowing that PrEP prevents HIV and support with access to PrEP are necessary for Black cisgender women.

The purposes of the vlogs through the campaign were to share information about ways to prevent HIV using PrEP and fact-based education and provide access to PrEP resources with active links to local PrEP providers at local community health centers.

In Phase 1, the study team formerly piloted full-length video blog posts (ie, vlogs; 10-12 min each) with 26 women during an emergency department visit. Using the findings from Phase 1, Phase 2 involved a prospective 6-month social media marketing campaign. The study team led a Texas-Development CFAR-funded pilot grant to disseminate brief vlog snippets (30 s) of excerpts from full-length vlogs with a larger group of Black women in Harris County. Community members, who were aged 18-55 years, usually consume content that is often viewed by Black cisgender women (ie, health and beauty) and reside in neighborhoods (based on zip code) in Harris County where most residents are Black or African American. They were shown a series of brief vlog snippets on their social media pages, along with a brief message about PrEP and an active hyperlink to local PrEP resources. The study team assessed implementation outcomes, including the feasibility and acceptability, appropriateness of vlogs, access to PrEP resources at local clinics, and clinical outcomes such as increased PrEP awareness among Black cisgender women.

Within 6 months, the campaign reached 110.8k unique individuals (the number of unique accounts that have seen your content at least once) who identified as women. When stratified by age, video plays (the number of times a video starts playing) at 50% of the vlogs (n=30,877) were most common among women aged 18-24 years (n=12,017) and least common among women aged 45-54 years (n=658). Key performance indicators showed that 1,098,629 impressions (the number of times a user saw the vlog) and 1,002,244 total video plays resulted in 15,952 link clicks to local PrEP resources.

The campaign demonstrated the feasibility and acceptability of this approach with Black cisgender women and illustrated preliminary effectiveness at supporting access to local PrEP resources with Black cisgender women. Further dissemination and implementation of this approach is necessary to fully assess whether vlog viewership and clicks on links to PrEP resources can meaningfully empower Black cisgender women to access PrEP and help them to assess whether PrEP is personally a useful HIV prevention option.