Responding to health and digital inequities among older African Americans, a customized web-based mobile health information intervention is being developed for this vulnerable group and their doctors as part of the Health Empowerment Technologies (HET) Project. The belief is an empowered patient-doctor relationship leads to more improved health outcomes than patient empowerment alone. Using health information technology to empower both older African Americans and their doctors by increasing health literacy and computer capacities of both is the major HET study aim. A focus group of older African American patients and one of their doctors yielded data to help build the HET. Thematic analysis of opinions and preferences about the content and structure of the HET revealed concordance and asymmetry among the patients and doctors. While challenges prevail in its construction, building this ethnicity-specific web-based health information technology presents the opportunity to integrate health information technology in clinical encounters for every patient.

Using a collective case study design with benchmarking features, research reported here sought to locate differences in agency practices between public mental health agencies in which African American clients were doing comparatively better on specific proxy outcomes related to community tenure, and agencies with less success on those same variables. A panel of experts from the Ohio Department of Mental Health matched four agencies on per capita spending, percentage of African American clients, and urban-intensive setting. The panel also differentiated agencies on the basis of racial group comparisons for a number of proxy variables related to successful community tenure. Two agencies had a record of success with this client group (benchmark agencies); and two were less successful based on the selected criteria (comparison agencies). Findings indicated that when service elements explicitly related to culture were similar across study sites, the characteristics that did appear to make a difference were aspects of organizational culture. Implications for administration practice and further research are discussed.

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