Kudos to Schenita Randolph and her entire team for the submission of her Duke REACH – Equity Investigator Development Award Program application entitled “Community Connection: Improving patient-centered care and HIM disparities among Black Men.” This proposal requests funding for a two-year period with a start date of July 1, 2018.

This study will lead to pilot testing the effectiveness of the Community Connection intervention to improve patient-centered care in the clinical encounter, HIV testing, condom use and number of sexual partners.

The proposal specific aims are:

Aim 1: Explore and describe Black heterosexual males’ and primary care providers’ perspectives of patient-provider interpersonal processes of care, trust and perceived biases related to Black male sexual health in the context of the clinical encounter. To inform the development of an intervention, I will derive patient-provider perspectives through individual phone interviews and focus groups using a semistructured interview guide framed by the Interpersonal Processes of Care (IPC) Survey domains of communication, patient-centered decision making, and interpersonal style [4], as well as quantitative measures using the Implicit Bias Association Test (IBAT) [5], Medical Mistrust Index (MMI) [6] and IPC survey.

Aim 2: Develop and optimize the usability and acceptability of an HIV risk-reduction intervention based on previous evidence of barber-based sexual health interventions, concepts of interpersonal processes of care, CDC guidelines and stakeholder input using an interactive process. I will conduct two design thinking workshops (development) and three focus groups (optimization) to improve the usability and acceptability of the intervention until we reach 85 percent satisfaction scores using the Systems Usability Scale (SUS) [7] and an acceptability measure.

This project will lead to an R-level application to NINR to examine the feasibility and preliminary impact of the intervention on patient-provider interpersonal communication processes and Black heterosexual males’ sexual health outcomes.