The candidate requests support for a one-year program supplement to evaluate the impact of both clinician and patient training in digital health around care outcomes. The project will be done in partnership with a network of community mental health centers who are ready to begin today, and will utilize existing digital health training resources already developed and piloted by our team In the proposed project, the candidate will build upon his previous experiences in engineering, clinical informatics, clinical psychiatry, and ongoing K23 award. The goals of this supplement are well aligned with the K23 as ensuring both patients and clinicians are comfortable using digital technologies creates the exact environment where digital phenotyping methods (the focus of the K23) can thrive. The digital skills taught to patients and clinicians in this proposal are timely and actionable. Given these efforts were already in progress before the pandemic as evidenced by early published papers, we are confident this approach is not rush but rather thoughtfully designed to best serve the SMI clinical community. The patent facing digital skills group (DOORS) has already been offered to over 100 patients and the clinician facing training (Digital Navigator) has been fully designed with a detail curriculum in place. Expanding, improving, and offering these trainings will offer immediate benefit in helping ensure technology can be used to increase access to care for SMI patients. Assessing the hypothesis around dual training (for patients and clinicians) and its potentially synergistic nature compared to only provider and patient training is novel. Results of this project will thus not only create new training resources that we will update in real time based on outcomes, but may suggest a new approach of offering dual training that has never been tried before with the SMI clinical community.
This project will offer novel digital skills training for both clinicians and patients. The trainings can be delivered online or in person and aim to expand workforce capacity and access to care for people with serious mental illnesses. All trainings and resources will be freely available online. We will assess if care outcomes improve when both the clinician and patient receive training as compared to only one or none.
| Torous, John; Bauer, Amy; Chan, Steven et al. (2018) Smart Steps for Psychiatric Education: Approaching Smartphone Apps for Learning and Care. Acad Psychiatry 42:791-795 |
