Developing a Mental Health eClinic to Improve Access to and Quality of Mental Health Care for Young People: Using Participatory Design as Research Methodologies

Abstract

BackgroundEach year, many young Australians aged between 16 and 25 years experience a mental health disorder, yet only a small proportion access services and even fewer receive timely and evidence-based treatments. Today, with ever-increasing access to the Internet and use of technology, the potential to provide all young people with access (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) to the support they require to improve their mental health and well-being is promising.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to use participatory design (PD) as research methodologies with end users (young people aged between 16 and 25 years and youth health professionals) and our research team to develop the Mental Health eClinic (a Web-based mental health clinic) to improve timely access to, and better quality, mental health care for young people across Australia.MethodsA research and development (R&D) cycle for the codesign and build of the Mental Health eClinic included several iterative PD phases: PD workshops; translation of knowledge and ideas generated during workshops to produce mockups of webpages either as hand-drawn sketches or as wireframes (simple layout of a webpage before visual design and content is added); rapid prototyping; and one-on-one consultations with end users to assess the usability of the alpha build of the Mental Health eClinic.ResultsFour PD workshops were held with 28 end users (young people n=18, youth health professionals n=10) and our research team (n=8). Each PD workshop was followed by a knowledge translation session. At the conclusion of this cycle, the alpha prototype was built, and one round of one-on-one end user consultation sessions was conducted (n=6; all new participants, young people n=4, youth health professionals n=2). The R&D cycle revealed the importance of five key components for the Mental Health eClinic: a home page with a visible triage system for those requiring urgent help; a comprehensive online physical and mental health assessment; a detailed dashboard of results; a booking and videoconferencing system to enable video visits; and the generation of a personalized well-being plan that includes links to evidence-based, and health professional–recommended, apps and etools.ConclusionsThe Mental Health eClinic provides health promotion, triage protocols, screening, assessment, a video visit system, the development of personalized well-being plans, and self-directed mental health support for young people. It presents a technologically advanced and clinically efficient system that can be adapted to suit a variety of settings in which there is an opportunity to connect with young people. This will enable all young people, and especially those currently not able or willing to connect with face-to-face services, to receive best practice clinical services by breaking down traditional barriers to care and making health care more personalized, accessible, affordable, and available.

Project Synergy: co‐designing technology‐enabled solutions for Australian mental health services reform

“…In this study, the prototypic online platform brought together a general health and wellbeing prototype (Chapter 3) with a more specialised mental health e‐clinic prototype (Chapter 6). Subsequent integration of these two prototypes onto one online platform also required the development of single sign‐on (a user authentication service that allows users to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials [eg, email and password]) and interoperability of data between the two prototypes.…”

“…A prototypic mental health e‐clinic was co‐designed with young people, health professionals and researchers . It aimed to deliver best practice clinical services online to young people experiencing mental health problems.…”

Right care, first time: a highly personalised and measurement‐based care model to manage youth mental health

“…The InnoWell Platform is an Australian example of health information technology that has been co‐designed to be integrated within locally connected care systems with the aim of improving access, efficiency, outcomes and care continuity . It does this by enabling real‐time and comprehensive online assessment (including the determination of clinical stage and multidimensional needs), self‐monitoring and routine outcome monitoring, and facilitation of access to high quality online psychological interventions. Such new and innovative technologies allow health professionals and services to provide highly personalised and measurement‐based care .…”

Experiences and satisfaction of children, young people and their parents with alternative mental health models to inpatient settings: a systematic review

“…The final sample comprised of 19 articles included in this review and provides outcome evidence in the following four domains: alternative models [21,26,27,29,30]; interventions applied to Crisis [22,[31][32][33]; telepsychiatry and mobile applications applied to mental health crisis [35,38,39,41]; and experience and satisfaction with mental health crisis provision [25,28,34,36,37,40].…”

“…The 19 studies included in this review came from 5 different countries; 8 studies came from the UK [21,22,[25][26][27][28][29][30], 5 from the US [31][32][33][34][35], 3 from Australia [36][37][38], 2 from Canada [39,40] and 1 from Denmark [41]. Eight studies utilised a qualitative methodology [25,28,29,34,[36][37][38]40] and two studies were based on a qualitative case-study approach [22,33]. In contrast, three studies followed a quantitative descriptive approach [30,35,39], while one study had a mixed-methods design [26].…”