# Enhancing Partner Services among Men Who Have Sex with Men Living With HIV: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial

> **NIH NIH R34** · UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL · 2020 · $185,516

## Abstract

Project title: Enhancing Partner Services among Men Who Have Sex with Men Living With HIV: A
Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial
Despite global efforts to control HIV among key populations, new infections among men who have sex with
men (MSM) are still increasing. To deal with this challenge, HIV prevention strategies with high efficacy are
urgently needed. Partner services (PS), the process of informing potential risk of exposure to sexual
partners, is a cornerstone of HIV prevention. PS are important for identifying cases, reducing re-infection
rates, promoting linkage to care, and reducing costs. However, barriers from both health providers and
index cases limit the efficacy of PS. As a result, PS is underused in many countries, including China where
only 16% of index HIV case spouses were notified. Crowdsourcing can be used to improve the
effectiveness of PS. Crowdsourcing is an approach that obtains solutions from communities.
Crowdsourcing has been used effectively in public health to improve HIV testing, promote condom use, and
monitor outbreaks. As a bottom-up approach, crowdsourcing can effectively engage MSM and other
stakeholders to contribute their voices to enhance understanding of HIV PS and design participant-oriented
interventions. Crowdsourced messages developed for PS may resonate more strongly with MSM compared
to traditional PS messages. In turn, this could lead to increased community participation and acceptance of
HIV PS, improving the effectiveness of HIV PS. We hypothesize that a crowdsourced HIV PS approach is
feasible and acceptable. We also hypothesize that, as compared to conventional PS using referral cards
(standard of care in China), will yield: a) more sexual partners reporting for HIV testing, and b) more sexual
partners with confirmed HIV. Our multi-disciplinary research team brings together crowdsourcing and PS
experience, a history of working with MSM in China, and a rich local infrastructure for HIV research, to
investigate the following aims: (1) to develop a crowdsourced PS intervention for Chinese MSM using open
contests; (2) to test the feasibility, acceptability and pilot the preliminary impact of crowdsourced PS with
conventional PS on promoting HIV testing uptake among partners of newly identified MSM cases using a
pilot randomized controlled trial. In this pilot project, we will first use open contests to develop a
crowdsourced PS intervention for Chinese MSM, then we will conduct a pilot RCT in which index MSM
cases are randomized to receive crowdsourced intervention or standard of care in a ratio of 2:1. The project
will develop crowdsourced intervention strategies for promoting HIV PS, and collect preliminary data for a
full RCT that aims to further evaluate the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of crowdsourced PS in multiple
Chinese cities.
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## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9991921
- **Project number:** 5R34MH119963-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL
- **Principal Investigator:** Weiming Tang
- **Activity code:** R34 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $185,516
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-08-08 → 2022-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9991921

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9991921, Enhancing Partner Services among Men Who Have Sex with Men Living With HIV: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial (5R34MH119963-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-28 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9991921. Licensed CC0.

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