Building the Digital Mental Health Ecosystem: Opportunities and Challenges for Mobile Health Innovators.

Publisher: JMIR Publications Country of Publication: Canada NLM ID: 100959882 Publication Model: Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1438-8871 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 14388871 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Med Internet Res Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: <2011- > : Toronto : JMIR Publications
Original Publication: [Pittsburgh, PA? : s.n., 1999-

COVID-19* ; Telemedicine*; Ecosystem ; Humans ; Mental Health ; Pandemics ; SARS-CoV-2

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.
(©Benedetta Spadaro, Nayra A Martin-Key, Sabine Bahn. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 13.10.2021.)

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Keywords: digital implementation; digital mental health; digital psychiatry; digital technology; viewpoint

Date Created: 20211013 Date Completed: 20211018 Latest Revision: 20211111

20231215

PMC8552100

10.2196/27507

34643537