Presenter Profile
Jill Solomon, MPH, CHES
University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center
jrsolom@med.umich.edu
Jill joined the center in 2022. In her role at the Center, she supports training and outreach across all of the U-M IPC’s focus areas of injury prevention. Jill holds a Master of Public Health Degree in Health Behavior & Health Education from the University of Michigan School of Public Health and is a Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES). She has experience in health literacy, motivational interviewing, and mHealth development.
Presentations
Improving Checkpoints, an online teen driver safety program, to increase reach and accessibility
Jill Solomon, MPH, CHES
The Checkpoints program is designed to educate parents and teens about teen driving risks and encourage them to create a Parent-Teen driving agreement. Using feedback from partners, we have collaborated with specialists to enhance the program's reach and accessibility.
We partnered with the Tennessee Department of Health, Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center, and Wyoming Department of Health to implement the Checkpoints program. Feedback from these agencies helped us identify barriers. In 2024, we collaborated with MindSpring to improve the program's language, structure, and design and with BoxCar to enhance the website's technical features.
Partner conversations revealed the need for several site improvements to boost engagement and reach. In the Tennessee version of the program, between August 2021 and February 2024, we observed over 18,000 pageviews but only 17 agreements, indicating that participants were not completing the critical agreement portion. Stakeholders also noted difficulties in accessing necessary reporting information, such as participant names and total agreements. Furthermore, tracking revisits to the agreement was not possible, limiting valuable insight into user engagement. Identified platform limitations included email reminders, registration bugs, and navigation issues, as well as needs related to content framing, design, reporting, and accessibility.
In response to stakeholder feedback and partnership expertise, we enhanced the Checkpoints program. With MindSpring, we transitioned content from video-based to reading and activity-based and split the program into separate sections for teens and adults to complete individually, adding tailored behavioral content. We also reduced the reading level. BoxCar's collaboration improved site navigation and technical aspects, simplifying participant use and administration.
By improving the platform, we believe that we will be able to increase the number of people completing the driver agreement. Ultimately, this will help keep teen drivers safe during their first year of licensure.
1. How to work with vendors to create an online intervention.
2. How to work with external partners to gather actionable feedback for interventions.
3. How to incorporate behavioral content into a teen driver safety intervention.