The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the limitations of relying solely on in-person contact for diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of mental health conditions. Mobile health approaches can be used to monitor mental health patients remotely, but they are not properly integrated with existing models of healthcare service delivery. We present findings from a case study of a mobile app enabled cloud-based software program rolled out in a phone based psychological service to enable real-time/temporal monitoring. The program offered patients an app to record measures of symptoms in everyday contexts and provided clinicians with access to an accompanying dashboard to use information from the app to tailor treatments and monitor progress and ultimately facilitate earlier and personalised care decisions. Feedback related to implementation and utility was gathered from clinicians through a focus group conducted two months post-roll-out. Findings identified that the system is valuable and feasible, however implementation issues were identified. These are discussed in order to inform future work in this area to support the delivery of timely and responsive mental health care in the community.

Summary A common issue among digital health applications is that they are based on project‐specific solutions and are developed from scratch, which results in redundant development and lack of data and technology reuse. This can be seen in, for example, building study specific websites and mobile frontends, deploying customized infrastructures, and collecting data that may have been collected in other studies and projects. However, existing data and technology are not easily shareable between projects due to large investment required to address data exchanging mechanism, data and technology sovereignty, data security and resource discovery, while the benefit for the resource owners is uncertain. In this article, we present a supporting framework, named DHLink, to address this issue on two fronts. First, the DHLink framework securely connects multiple digital health applications, facilitates real‐time data sharing, and supports rapid application development by reusing data and technology. Second, to aid in rapid development of new digital health applications, a set of highly generic and reusable microservices has been developed as the initial resources available in the DHLink ecosystem. Two proof‐of‐concept use cases outlined show the effectiveness of DHLink for both data sharing between existing applications, and rapid development of a new application.