Abstract
Digital mental health technologies such as mobile health (mHealth) tools can offer innovative ways to help develop and facilitate mental health care provision, with the COVID-19 pandemic acting as a pivot point for digital health implementation. This viewpoint offers an overview of the opportunities and challenges mHealth innovators must navigate to create an integrated digital ecosystem for mental health care moving forward. Opportunities exist for innovators to develop tools that can collect a vast range of active and passive patient and transdiagnostic symptom data. Moving away from a symptom-count approach to a transdiagnostic view of psychopathology has the potential to facilitate early and accurate diagnosis, and can further enable personalized treatment strategies. However, the uptake of these technologies critically depends on the perceived relevance and engagement of end users. To this end, behavior theories and codesigning approaches offer opportunities to identify behavioral drivers and address barriers to uptake, while ensuring that products meet users’ needs and preferences. The agenda for innovators should also include building strong evidence-based cases for digital mental health, moving away from a one-size-fits-all well-being approach to embrace the development of comprehensive digital diagnostics and validated digital tools. In particular, innovators have the opportunity to make their clinical evaluations more insightful by assessing effectiveness and feasibility in the intended context of use. Finally, innovators should adhere to standardized evaluation frameworks introduced by regulators and health care providers, as this can facilitate transparency and guide health care professionals toward clinically safe and effective technologies. By laying these foundations, digital services can become integrated into clinical practice, thus facilitating deeper technology-enabled changes.
Highlights
Mental health disorders represent the leading cause of disability worldwide, with over one third of the world’s population being affected by a mental health condition in their lifetime [1]
In building a holistic and comprehensive digital mental health ecosystem that augments rather than replaces traditional mental health care approaches, strategies for the design, validation, and implementation of mobile health (mHealth) technologies should be carefully considered by innovators moving forward
A way to address this is by utilizing behavior theories and engaging in codesigning approaches when designing digital mental health care solutions
Summary
Mental health disorders represent the leading cause of disability worldwide, with over one third of the world’s population being affected by a mental health condition in their lifetime [1]. Mobile health (mHealth) tools such as apps can offer innovative ways to help develop and facilitate mental health care provision.
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