Describing Engagement HIV Care Cascade

Describing Engagement HIV Care Cascade standardizes definitions of engagement within the HIV care cascade to enable consistent measurement and comparability across HIV clinical trials and pooled analyses.

Key Features:

• Standardization of Definitions: Establishes a unified set of engagement definitions to reduce heterogeneity across HIV clinical trials.
• Comprehensive Analysis: Analyzes 13 eligible studies drawn from the CASCADE database (298 studies catalogued) and identifies six primary categories for defining engagement: appointment adherence, laboratory testing, adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART), time specification, intervention adherence, and quality of interaction.
• Data-Driven Insights: Leverages clinical trial outcome data that list engagement to summarize diverse methodologies and explicit definitions used across studies.
• Research Guidance: Provides a consensus-driven framework to support design choices for measuring engagement in future studies.
• Methodological Synthesis: Synthesizes definitions and measurable outcomes from multiple studies to create a structured framework applicable across research contexts.

Scientific Applications:

• Enhanced Comparability: Enables more accurate cross-study comparisons of engagement metrics in HIV research.
• Improved Data Pooling: Facilitates pooling of data from multiple trials to increase statistical power and generalizability.
• Guidance for Future Research: Informs development of standardized engagement metrics for studies of people living with HIV (PLWH) aiming to achieve and maintain undetectable viral loads.

Methodology:

Analysis of 13 eligible studies from the CASCADE database (cataloguing 298 studies) with categorization of engagement definitions into six primary categories: appointment adherence, laboratory testing, adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART), time specification, intervention adherence, and quality of interaction.