Our Pilot Implementation
We are currently piloting the use of a version of Network Canvas within Partner Services at a single Partner Services site in order to demonstrate feasibility, acceptability, and gather preliminary evidence of efficacy.
Below you will find details of our implementation, and resources to help you implement Network Canvas locally, using our workflow.
Our Partner Site
Howard Brown Health is an LGBTQ+ healthcare and services provider based in Chicago. The agency serves more than 40,000 adults and youth, focusing around primary medical care, behavioral health, research, HIV/STI prevention, youth services, elder services, and community initiatives. Howard Brown Health collaborates with CDPH to provide Partner Services for patients who test positive for HIV/STIs in their clinics.
How do we measure outcomes?
To understand the outcomes of our pilot implementation, we will assess feasibility and acceptability via key informant interviews and surveys, and initial evidence of efficacy through anonymized Partner Services data using a pre/post analysis of data quality, partners notified, and timeliness.
What is our implementation strategy?
We are using the Active Implementation Frameworks (AIF) to guide our pilot implementation. AIF was chosen because of its comprehensiveness and becuase, unlike many other approaches, it heavily emphasizes the importance of the installation stage and the practical preparation necessary to ready a site to fully accommodate a new innovation. As detailed within our timeline, our project is following four stages: exploration, installation, initial implementation, and full implementation.
Our Pilot Interview Protocol
Taking the understanding of the interview process we acquired from the interviews, we constructed a version of the DIS interview within the Network Canvas software.
Howard Brown Health Training Guide
Howard Brown Health coordinator, Justin Torres, created a comprehensive guide for the Interviewer app. This guide walks interviewers through each section of the implementation survey, breaking down the steps and providing helpful tips for optimal performances.
Workflow
A pilot implementation posed a number of logistical challenges for our team and our partners. While direct integration with CHIMS/Maven (which would allow Network Canvas data to directly enter those systems) would have been the preferred solution, this was not possible within the scope of this initial project.
Our team devised the following workflow to assist DIS in transferring this highly sensitive and complex data from the Interviewer app, and into CHIMS/Maven.
Open Interview Data in RShiny
Since automatic integration with CHIMS/Maven was not possible within the scope of this project, we instead developed a custom RShiny app to present Network Canvas data to DIS in a convenient format for copying into the system.
Conduct an Interview
A Partner Services Interview is conducted, using Network Canvas Interviewer and the co-developed interview protocol.
Copy data into CHIMS/Maven
Once formatted via the RShiny app, the DIS is able to quickly and easily copy data across into the CHIMS/Maven system.
Steps to Implement Network Canvas Locally
If you are interested in implementing Network Canvas for use in partner notification services, or just want to explore and evaluate the software, the instructions below will recreate the workflow we used in our pilot implementation.
Set up the Partner Services interview.
Download the Interviewer app on whichever devices you would like to use to conduct your interviews. Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android are supported. See our documentation site for further details.
Optionally, download our RShiny helper app.
Data entry was a major challenge due to the complexities of software systems integration, so we created an rshiny data reader app designed to read data captured within the Network Canvas interview, and format it exactly as required by CHIMS/Maven. You may download this tool from GitHub.
While this is what works for Chicago, you are free to modify it for your own needs.