Publication Date
Winter 3-5-2025
Item Type
Text
Executive Summary
Partnering with a Family Shelter to Increase Access to MyChart
Over the past two months, our group of seven nursing students has collaborated with a local nonprofit homeless shelter for women and families. Many of the guests served by this organization are refugees or asylum seekers who have little to no exposure to the American healthcare system. Whether this is due to a low level of health literacy or lack of education surrounding access to health care, we identified a need in this population to increase the number of guests who can easily access their healthcare information. This need led us to plan and implement an intervention with the goal of promoting health literacy for guests of this organization by setting up individual MyChart accounts.
Background
Riggs et al. (2016) describes the importance of health literacy in refugee populations. They explain that a low level of health literacy is to be expected as people navigate a new country, language, and culture. The authors go on to explain the consequences of low health literacy, including worse health outcomes and distrust in medical professionals.
Local healthcare systems offer MyChart as a way to communicate with healthcare providers, access test results, refill medications, and pay bills. However, our liaison with the shelter informed our group that guests frequently have difficulty signing up for MyChart, and shelter staff were unfamiliar with the sign-up process. Riggs et al. (2016) further suggest that difficulty navigating new information systems and technology exacerbates pre-existing trauma for refugees and can leave them feeling isolated and helpless. Connecting shelter guests with technology allows them to access their health records, and contacting their providers would be empowering and logistically helpful.
Activities and Rationale
During the planning phase of this project, our group heavily focused on how to reach the greatest number of people in a diverse community. According to our organization’s liaison, the most-spoken languages at the shelter are English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Lingala, and Tigrinya. With this in mind, we decided to create printed instructions on how to set up a Gmail and MyChart account in all six languages. Since we do not have group members with certified fluency in languages other than English, we translated our deliverables with Google Translate and cross-checked these translations with a non-Google based website or a fluent speaker. We decided on using Google Translate as our first line of translation as Ducar and Schocket (2018) stated that Google Translate has recently implemented Artificial Intelligence which has greatly decreased translation errors and literal translations. After Google Translate was used, we found local speakers to proofread the translations for Spanish, Portuguese, and French while using a second translation website for the Lingala and Tigrinya instructions. Finally, the liaison of the organization informed us that we could use a phone interpreter service during our teaching day. We included using this service in our plan in hopes that it would improve face-to-face conversations with guests.
Outcomes
Our group hosted a four-hour long, in-person event at the shelter to help guests set up MyChart accounts. We had previously identified outcomes for this event which included the following: Assist five guests in setting up a MyChart account, achieve a 75% rate of guests being able to log into their accounts on the first try, and develop sign-up instruction sheets to leave at the shelter after our in-person event.
During our time at the shelter, twelve guests approached us with questions about MyChart, and six of these guests agreed to a teaching session to help them set up an account, which exceeded our identified outcome of setting up five accounts. To evaluate the effectiveness of our one-on-one teaching sessions, our group used the teach-back method. The teach-back method is an evidence-based evaluation method of having the individual repeat back what they have learned (Riggs et al., 2016). We explained to the guests that we wanted them to show us how to log in to their accounts without any prompting. Of these six guests, all of them were able to demonstrate accessing the MyChart website and logging into their accounts on the first try. To this extent, we exceeded our identified outcome of a 75% first-try login rate. We felt confident that once we left the shelter, guests would continue to be able to access their accounts.
To further evaluate the effectiveness of our interventions, we invited participants to share feedback by asking open-ended questions at the end of our teaching sessions (Saunders et al., 2005). We asked the guests, “Do you have any more questions about how to access MyChart?” and “Is there anything we could change about our teachings to be more helpful?”. Common feedback we received was that guests wanted more direction on how to find the phone number to call their physician’s office. Our group modified our teachings to highlight where to find this information in the MyChart application.
Conclusion
Our goal to promote health literacy by creating MyChart accounts for guests at a local family homeless shelter has been met according to the previously mentioned evaluation methods. The guests we helped create accounts for were able to independently log in and navigate the site without prompting following our teaching session. To allow for this intervention to reach more people beyond our teaching day, our group left physical copies of the instructions at the organization for future guests to follow. However, our group was limited in the number of people we could reach as we only had the capacity to host one in-person event. Because the deliverables are already created and translated, future replications of this project require little preparation other than hosting more in-person teaching days. We appreciate having the opportunity to work with this shelter to increase healthcare access within the refugee population.
Recommended Citation
Stehle, Elizabeth S.; Becerra, Brenna; Diallo, Zahra; Grassell, Kristin; Rodriguez-Cruz, Cassandra; Ahn, Elaine; and Duropan, Lola, "Partnering with a Family Shelter to Increase Access to MyChart" (2025). Nursing Leadership in Community Engagement Projects. 57.
https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/shs_nlce/57
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