Feasibility Trial of the iAMHealthy Intervention for Healthy Weight in Rural Children Recruited From Primary Care Clinics

The iAmHealthy Trial was a 6-month feasibility trial comparing the iAmHealthy behavioral intervention versus newsletter intervention. The trial was conducted in four clinics affiliated with the IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trial Network and assessed: participant recruitment, participant retention, intervention dose, and blinding. The iAmHealthy behavioral intervention included group and individual sessions for caregivers and children delivered via video conference on study-supplied tablets. These sessions focused on nutrition, physical activity, and behavior change. The iAmHealthy behavioral intervention also included a monthly newsletter that focused on general child health. The newsletter intervention used only the same monthly newsletter. The objectives of the study were to determine which of 2 recruitment methods works best to get rural participants to join a research study about children who weigh more than is considered healthy and to determine what works to keep participants in the study. The study involved a total of 104 children between 6 to 11 years of age who live in a rural area and one of their caregivers. Key outcomes include the determination that the traditional recruitment method produced a higher percent success rate (21.7%) but a 23 times lower number of candidates (23 vs. 535 for the consecutive recruitment strategy) and a 20 percent lower number of enrolled participants (5 vs. 99). Each intervention had a high retention rate, 86.5% for the iAmHealthy intervention and 96.2% for the News Letter only intervention.