Clinician Opinions: Perceived Utility of and Barriers to Incorporating Pretreatment Ecological Momentary Assessment Into Clinical Care

Abstract

Increasingly, clinicians have the option of including technological components into clinical care. However, little research has assessed clinicians’ interest in utilizing technology in their clinical work. Here, clinicians reported their opinions related to using a mobile assessment platform (MAP) to collect ecological data from clients before providing clinical care. Practicing and training mental health clinicians (N = 221) reported demographics, characteristics of their clinical work, and confidence in their clinical skill. Participants then read a description of MAP and responded to questions about their perceived benefits of and barriers to its use. Last, participants rated their interest in using MAP in their clinical work. These perceptions were then factor-analyzed and the resulting factor scores were regressed onto clinician characteristics. Interest in using MAP was significantly lower for the group that endorsed a psychodynamic/psychoanalytic orientation and those with greater confidence in their clinical skills. Across scales, we found a pattern that participants who did not identify as male, those with a psychodynamic/psychoanalytic orientation, and those with greater confidence in their clinical skills tended to have lower ratings of the benefits of and higher ratings for the barriers to using MAP. Results revealed that significant differences in opinions about incorporating technology into clinical work exist between different groups of clinicians. This information may be useful in future work that attempts to implement technological tools into clinical settings.