The 3 key challenges in digital mental healthcare
In today’s tech-savvy world, mental healthcare is catching up with the digital wave, recognizing the power of technology in reshaping our mental well-being. The digital mental health space has seen incredible progress, offering therapy, support, and self-care tools right at our fingertips. But, as with any journey, there are bumps in the road. Let’s explore three crucial challenges that this field must address to keep evolving and making a real difference, together with some tips and tricks to overcome them.
1. Quality of the content
The central component of a healthcare provider’s offering undoubtedly comprises the content it delivers to its users. In addition to the actual therapeutic value of the content, the format and presentation style are equally significant. Users prioritize content quality as their primary criterion when considering various solutions.
One effective method to enhance your content is by prioritizing evidence-based practices through collaborations with reputable mental health professionals and organizations. This collaborative approach ensures the credibility and accuracy of your information, providing valuable insights to your audience.
An additional approach is to integrate user feedback and reviews, allowing for the identification of areas within the content that may benefit from enhancements or updates. This feedback will allow you to further refine and optimize your content.
2. User guidance
Research has consistently demonstrated that software-based mental health solutions incorporating human support yield greater effectiveness compared to self-guided or automated treatments. The significance of encouragement, affirmation, and therapist self-disclosures in fostering clinical improvement cannot be overstated.
While providing human support in digital interventions demands considerable time and resources, there is a growing focus on investigating conversational agents, such as chatbots, to emulate human support.
Interestingly, users have reported feeling supported by chatbots, even when they are aware of communicating with artificial agents. Therefore, exploring the potential of chatbots as a means to offer human-like support in your digital mental healthcare platforms may prove beneficial for both providers and users alike.
3. Personalization
The importance of accommodating user’s needs and preferences for treatment outcomes in mental healthcare has been firmly established. Therefore, personalizing interventions to cater to individual needs is a promising approach for enhancing care. This involves adapting the content, such as exercises, videos, blogs, and telehealth, to the user, which is crucial for boosting efficacy and engagement throughout the user journey.
Four possible mechanisms have emerged: user choice, provider choice, rule-based personalization, and ML-based personalization. User choice allows intentional personalization based on the participant’s direct selection, while provider choice involves the personalization decision being made by either a guiding individual or a clinician in a blended setting. Automated personalization mechanisms include rule-based systems employing if-then decision rules and ML-based systems utilizing learned decision criteria. We kindly refer to our blog post on how AI can be used within mental healthcare to increase user personalization.
You can enhance your users’ experience by incorporating one of the four available mechanisms, tailored specifically to their needs and preferences. This approach will not only improve user satisfaction but also foster stronger engagement and loyalty towards your offering.
Generaly, limited or non-personalised platforms directly suffer from a:
- 25-40% lower patient satisfaction rate;
- 15-30% more dropouts;
- 10-20% decrease in positive treatment outcomes;
This is precisely where IntelliProve can make a significant difference. Recognizing the urgent need, we have developed a smart mental health assessment tool that can initiate and guide an online patient health journey. Check out one of our client stories to show how facial health checks can be used to improve user experience.
Conclusion
Quality of the content, user guidance and personalisation: the three key challenges of digital mental healthcare solutions. Together with some helpful tips on how to address them, we hope this information will assist you in improving the level of service you can offer to your users. If you wish to explore the topic further, we recommend taking a look at our in-depth whitepaper that delves into the digital transformation in mental healthcare.
Let’s tackle these challenges in your offering!
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