Adherence Interventions for HIV Youth Via Text & Cell Phone - Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART)

The purpose of this study is to test an adaptive adherence intervention, which utilizes two mobile health (mHealth) intervention designs, in an effort to promote adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) and achieve and maintain viral load (VL) suppression in youth living with HIV (YLH) while increasing understanding of the context for wide-scale implementation of cell phone support (CPS) and text messaging support (SMS), with and without incentives.

The study will consist of two points of randomization. The first step involves randomization of participants to receive either CPS or SMS using a 1:1 allocation ratio. Both intervention conditions will receive 3 months of intervention (i.e., 12 weeks of CPS or SMS). The second step involves a stratified randomization in blocks with 8 possible intervention trajectories. Within each condition, participants are categorized into two groups - responders with VL\<200 (Rsp) and non-responders with VL ≥200 (NRsp). Responders in the CPS condition will be randomly assigned to receive either 3 months of CPS tapered (CPS-T) intervention followed by standard care (SC) or only SC. Similarly, responders in the SMScondition will be randomly assigned to receive either 3 months of SMS tapered (SMS-T) intervention followed by SC or only SC. Non-responders in both CPS and SMS conditions will be randomly assigned to receive either 3 months of incentivized CPS (CPS-I) followed by 3 months of CPS-T and 3 months of SC or 3 months of incentivized SMS (SMS-I) followed by 3 months of SMS-T and 3 months of SC.