Developing an implementation blueprint: Lessons learned from integrating electronic patient-reported outcomes in HIV clinics in Alabama

Kelly W. Gagnon; Kaylee Burgan; Morgan Mulrain; Stefan Baral; Karen Cropsey; Michael Mugavero; Ellen Eaton

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0312782

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 6, 2024
26 Aug 2024 Decision Letter - Ibrahim Jahun, Editor PONE-D-24-13780Developing an Implementation Blueprint: Lessons Learned from Integrating Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes in HIV Clinics in AlabamaPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Gagnon, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please address all concerns raised by the reviewers (see below) and in addition, ensure that references and tables adhere to plosone publication requirements. Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 10 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. 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If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests section: "E reports honorarium from Gilead for participating in the HIV Re-engagement working group and from PRIME, DKBMed, and IAS-USA for developing HIV continuing education content." Please confirm that this does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, by including the following statement: ""This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests). If there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared. 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Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. 6. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: N/A Reviewer #3: N/A ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: No ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The manuscript is technically sound and pertinent to improving the quality of care of Person with HIV/AIDS (PWH) because I had previously worked with the author in trying to troubleshoot the best way of improving the health outcome of PWH. The author through this paper has highlighted the critical importance of introducing ePROs to specifically improve the health outcome of PWH particularly those susceptible to poor mental health and substance use. Reviewer #2: The paper was well written, lesson learnt, and discussion were well aligned. However, the authors need to pay more attention on the use abbreviations. for examples: 1. RWHAP was sometimes written as RHWAP (page 6, 15), this needs to be corrected. 2. SUD - described as substance use instead of substance use disorders. 3. UAB was not described in the paper. Reviewer #3: 1.Materials and Methods - Lines 103-104 speak of Qualitative Interviews and Structured Surveys. Please provide the respective interview guide and the survey questionnaire. They were not available under the data availability section. 2. Line 214, it will help if the authors could replace "Lessoned Learned" with RESULTS. They can include lessons learnt as a subtitle under RESULTS section. 3. An indication of many site visits was done, will be quite helpful as the authors recommended that there is a need to increase the site visits. So a measurement is needed to show from where this improvement ought to be done. 4. Discussion - It is advisable that the writers restrict their Discussions only to the study findings. They can only discuss what is stated in the results section, except where they are citing other literature in case of findings corroborations. 5. The definition of a Champion should come early, at the first instance of the word champion. 6. References: Please check all your references to ensure they are consistent with the Vancouver style. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Emeka Chrisian Madubuko Reviewer #2: Yes: Mukhtar Liman Ahmed Reviewer #3: Yes: Dr. Benson Ncube ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0312782.r001
Revision 1
10 Oct 2024 Author Response Response to Reviewers We sincerely thank the reviewer for their thoughtful and constructive suggestions, which have substantially strengthened our manuscript. Responses to the reviewer’s points are below. The reviewer’s original comments are listed followed by our response. Our responses correspond to changes highlighted in the revised article text and titled ‘Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. A clean version has also been included, titled 'Manuscript'. EDITOR COMMENTS TO AUTHOR 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf We have updated the manuscript to meet PLOS ONE’s style requirements. 2. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: "This study was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health (PI: Eaton, 5R01MH124633-04 )." Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: ""The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."" If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests section: "E reports honorarium from Gilead for participating in the HIV Re-engagement working group and from PRIME, DKBMed, and IAS-USA for developing HIV continuing education content." Please confirm that this does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, by including the following statement: ""This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests). If there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared. Please include your updated Competing Interests statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. We note that your Data Availability Statement is currently as follows: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information Files. Please confirm at this time whether or not your submission contains all raw data required to replicate the results of your study. Authors must share the “minimal data set” for their submission. PLOS defines the minimal data set to consist of the data required to replicate all study findings reported in the article, as well as related metadata and methods (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-minimal-data-set-definition). For example, authors should submit the following data: - The values behind the means, standard deviations and other measures reported; - The values used to build graphs; - The points extracted from images for analysis. Authors do not need to submit their entire data set if only a portion of the data was used in the reported study. If your submission does not contain these data, please either upload them as Supporting Information files or deposit them to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of recommended repositories, please see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/recommended-repositories. If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. If data are owned by a third party, please indicate how others may request data access. We have updated the data availability statement to reflect the added data file. The updated data availability statement is in the cover letter and we have uploaded the data file as Supporting Information. 5. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. We have added the Supporting Information files to the end of the manuscript. 6. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. We have reviewed our reference list to ensure that it is complete, correct, and does not contain any retracted papers. REVIEWER 1 COMMENTS TO AUTHOR The manuscript is technically sound and pertinent to improving the quality of care of Person with HIV/AIDS (PWH) because I had previously worked with the author in trying to troubleshoot the best way of improving the health outcome of PWH. The author through this paper has highlighted the critical importance of introducing ePROs to specifically improve the health outcome of PWH particularly those susceptible to poor mental health and substance use. We appreciate your comment. REVIEWER 2 COMMENTS TO AUTHOR The paper was well written, lesson learnt, and discussion were well aligned. However, the authors need to pay more attention on the use abbreviations. for examples: 1. RWHAP was sometimes written as RHWAP (page 6, 15), this needs to be corrected. 2. SUD - described as substance use instead of substance use disorders. 3. UAB was not described in the paper. Thank you for your comment! We have corrected these abbreviations throughout. REVIEWER 3 COMMENTS TO AUTHOR 1.Materials and Methods - Lines 103-104 speak of Qualitative Interviews and Structured Surveys. Please provide the respective interview guide and the survey questionnaire. They were not available under the data availability section. Thank you for this comment. Lines 103-104 were intended to describe the overall intervention and not the methods of this manuscript specifically. However, we agree that this is confusing to the read so have removed the aims of the larger intervention from the methods section. 2. Line 214, it will help if the authors could replace "Lessoned Learned" with RESULTS. They can include lessons learnt as a subtitle under RESULTS section. We have made this correction. 3. An indication of many site visits was done, will be quite helpful as the authors recommended that there is a need to increase the site visits. So a measurement is needed to show from where this improvement ought to be done. Thank you for this comment. We have added this information on lines 271 to 274. “Thus far, we have conducted two site visits to every site, one to launch the intervention (between April 2022 and March 2023) and second to check in, meet new staff, and discuss barriers to the intervention between May and August 2023.” 4. Discussion - It is advisable that the writers restrict their Discussions only to the study findings. They can only discuss what is stated in the results section, except where they are citing other literature in case of findings corroborations. We agree with the reviewer’s sentiment regarding the scope of discussions but were not able to identify anywhere in our discussion that goes outside of the scope of our results or cited literature. 5. The definition of a Champion should come early, at the first instance of the word champion. Thank you for this suggestion. We removed the initial first mention of champions so that the definition follows the first mention of champion on lines 159-161. 6. References: Please check all your references to ensure they are consistent with the Vancouver style. Thank you again for the careful assessment. We have further reviewed the references and corrected the journal names to the abbreviated titles. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0312782.r002
14 Oct 2024 Decision Letter - Ibrahim Jahun, Editor Developing an Implementation Blueprint: Lessons Learned from Integrating Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes in HIV Clinics in Alabama PONE-D-24-13780R1 Dear Dr. Gagnon, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Ibrahim Jahun, MD, MSC, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0312782.r003
Formally Accepted
18 Oct 2024 Acceptance Letter - Ibrahim Jahun, Editor PONE-D-24-13780R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Gagnon, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Ibrahim Jahun Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0312782.r004

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