Clinical Use of a Contraceptive Decision Aid and Patient Outcomes

Participants: Participants will be block assigned to one of two groups, an experimental and a control group. In the experimental group, women will discuss the Tuune contraception recommendations with their physician during their contraceptive counseling appointment. In the control group, women will go through a traditional counseling appointment with their physician.

Materials and Procedure: Participants will be block-randomized to either the traditional contraceptive counseling appointment or to the Tuune facilitated contraceptive counseling appointment. Data for the control condition will be collected prior to data collection for the Tuune condition to avoid introducing bias or contaminating the control condition viz care provider increase in contraceptive knowledge as a result of using Tuune. Once 200 patients have been successfully recruited and processed in the control condition, the clinic will incorporate use of the Tuune decision aid into patient appointments until such a time that 200 patients are successfully recruited and processed. Patients scheduling appointments with OSU Obstetrics and Gynecology during the intervention period (i.e., during the period in which use of the Tuune decision aid is being incorporated into patient appointments) will be sent a QR code in advance of their appointment that allows them to access the Tuune decision aid. Participants will be instructed to complete the decision aid health questionnaire (which asks patients to report on health conditions, as in a typical patient intake form, in addition to numerous questions about hormonal conditions and contraception goals) in advance of their appointment. Participants in the control condition will simply be asked standard clinic intake questions per a typical patient appointment.

All participants will be recruited by clinic staff at the time of their appointment. Prospective participants will be informed that they must be between the ages of 18 and 50 years old and cannot be pregnant, breastfeeding, or wishing to become pregnant. All participants will read over the recruitment materials and consent form in the waiting room of the clinic when waiting for their appointment. The nurse attending to patients will then go over the consent form to answer any questions for participants wishing to participate. All participants will then meet with their contraceptive care provider and discuss their reproductive health and contraceptive options. In the traditional appointment group, physicians will proceed as they normally would. In the Tuune condition, physicians will discuss the results of the Tuune health assessment with their patients by going through all the hormonal contraceptive suggestions provided by the digital aide, answering any questions, and providing additional information and guidance per the patient's needs.

Both groups of participants will be given a QR code that will take them to a brief survey to assess their satisfaction with their care, the degree to which they perceived their care to be person-centered, their positivity toward the medication they had been prescribed, and their perceived likelihood that they will take the prescribed medication. Finally, participants will be asked for their contact information for follow-up purposes and for delivery of a $10 digital gift card that will be sent to participants' phone or email as a thank you for their participation.

Three months after the contraceptive counseling appointment, participants will be contacted via email or text using the contact information provided at the time of their patient appointment to complete a brief follow-up survey in exchange for a $15 digital gift card. Three months was chosen as the follow-up period because it takes about three months for the body to adjust to a new hormonal contraceptive and for initial side effects to subside. Participants will be asked about whether they are still on the prescribed contraceptive and about their adherence and positivity toward the prescribed contraceptive. Participants will also be asked to report the number of side effects that improved and the number of side effects that worsened since beginning the recommended contraception.

The exact items and scoring procedures for all measures to be used can be viewed on the Open Science Framework (Open Science Project Number: 3hdm6). In particular, at Time 1 (immediately following the patient appointment) the investigators will assess: (a) patient satisfaction, (b) perceptions of the degree to which they received person-centered contraceptive counseling (PCCC), (c) positivity toward their prescribed medication, and (d) contraceptive use expectations. At Time 2 (3 months post-appointment), the investigators will assess (e) whether patients are still using their prescribed contraception, (f) their adherence to their contraception medication, and (g) their experience with both positive and negative side effects. Each of the chosen scales has been shown to be reliable and valid in a variety of clinical and non-clinical settings. Minor modifications to some established scales were made for the purposes of making them tailored to research question at hand (see Open Science Project Number 3hdm6 for details).

All materials and methods for this project are pre-registered and available on the Open Science Framework (Project: 3hdm6 available here: https://osf.io/3hdm6/).

Data Handling: All data will be analyzed by a blind coding process, meaning that the researchers performing the data analyses and the PI will be blind to which condition participants are in prior to data analysis. To this end all date and timestamp information will be removed by a trained scientist who is not affiliated with the current project and who is blind to the nature of the hypothesis under investigation. This will help ensure that those analyzing the data cannot infer which patients were in the Tuune condition and which received a traditional patient appointment.

Expected Outcomes: The investigators expect that patients using the Tuune decision aid will exhibit higher levels of patient satisfaction and greater positivity toward their prescribed contraceptive than women who receive a traditional contraceptive appointment only. Further, the investigators expect that patients using the Tuune decision aid will exhibit higher rates of contraceptive continuity, greater adherence to their prescription, and will report fewer negative side effects than those in the control condition.