Community health workers’ barriers and facilitators to use a novel mHealth tool for motivational interviewing to improve adherence to care among youth living with HIV in rural Nepal

Adherence to treatment regimens is a common challenge in achieving HIV control, especially among youth. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based intervention to facilitate behavior change (such as adherence to treatment) by focusing on the client’s priorities and motivations. Community Health Workers (CHWs), who are well situated to engage clients for care, can use MI but studies have shown that they often lose MI skills. While mHealth tools can support CHWs in delivering evidence-based counseling techniques such as MI, it is important to understand the barriers and facilitators in using such tools. Our parent study includes developing and testing a novel mHealth tool called, Community based mHealth Motivational Interviewing Tool for HIV-positive youth (COMMIT+). In this descriptive qualitative study, we share the results from semi-structured interviews with 12 CHWs who used COMMIT+ to engage youth living with HIV, and 7 of their Community Health Nurse supervisors. Our results demonstrate the barriers and facilitators experienced by CHWs in using a mHealth tool to deliver MI for youth living with HIV in rural Nepal, and highlight that supportive supervision and user-friendly features of the tool can mitigate many of the barriers.