Preliminary Impact of the weCare Social Media Intervention to Support Health for Young Men Who Have Sex with Men and Transgender Women with HIV

Young racial/ethnic minority men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women with HIV often have poor health outcomes. They also utilize a wide array of social media. Accordingly, we developed and implemented weCare, a social media intervention utilizing Facebook, texting, and GPS-based mobile social and sexual networking applications to improve HIV-related care engagement and health outcomes. We compared viral load suppression and clinic appointment attendance among 91 participants during the 12-month period before and after weCare implementation. McNemar's chi-square test analyses were conducted comparing the pre- and postintervention difference using paired data. Since February 2016, intervention staff and 91 intervention participants (79.1% African American and 13.2% Latino, mean age = 25) exchanged 13,830 messages during 3,758 conversations (average: 41.3 conversations per participant) across a variety of topics, including appointment reminders, medication adherence, problem solving, and reducing barriers. There were significant reductions in missed HIV care appointments (68.0% vs. 53.3%, p = 0.04) and increases in viral load suppression (61.3% vs. 88.8%, p