Digital Mental Health and COVID-19: Using Technology Today to Accelerate the Curve on Access and Quality Tomorrow

Torous, John; Myrick, Keris Jän; Rauseo-Ricupero, Natali; Firth, Joseph

doi:10.2196/18848

Cited by 768 publications

(655 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Telehealth rapidly became a necessary technology to guarantee continuity of care amidst worldwide physical distancing policies, by allowing patients to receive medical care while minimizing the risk of exposure -a critical concern for the elderly and those with chronic conditions [3]. As the pandemic remains ongoing, urgent action is required to support the digital transformation in healthcare and to understand the various concerns of patients needing care during this crisis [4]. Healthcare workers, patients, institutions, technology industries, and policymakers turned to social media to embrace this rapid shift in healthcare delivery.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media Data Analytics on Telehealth During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Massaad¹,

Cherfan²

2020

Cureus

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Introduction: Physical distancing during the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic has brought telehealth to the forefront to keep up with patient care amidst an international crisis that is exhausting healthcare resources. Understanding and managing health-related concerns resulting from physical distancing measures are of utmost importance. Objectives: To describe and analyze the volume, content, and geospatial distribution of tweets associated with telehealth during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods: We inquired Twitter public data to access tweets related to telehealth from March 30, 2020 to April 6, 2020. We analyzed tweets using natural language processing (NLP) and unsupervised learning methods. Clustering analysis was performed to classify tweets. Geographic tweet distribution was correlated with Covid-19 confirmed cases in the United States. All analyses were carried on the Google Cloud computing service "Google Colab" using Python libraries (Python Software Foundation). Results: A total of 41,329 tweets containing the term "telehealth" were retrieved. The most common terms appearing alongside 'telehealth' were "covid", "health", "care", "services", "patients", and "pandemic". Mental health was the most common health-related topic that appeared in our search reflecting a high need for mental healthcare during the pandemic. Similarly, Medicare was the most common appearing health plan mirroring the accelerated access to telehealth and change in coverage policies. The geographic distribution of tweets related to telehealth and having a specific location within the United States (n=19,367) was significantly associated with the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases reported in each state (p<0.001). Conclusion: Social media activity is an accurate reflection of disease burden during the Covid-19 pandemic. Widespread adoption of telehealth-favoring policies is necessary and mostly needed to address mental health problems that may arise in areas of high infection and death rates.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media Data Analytics on Telehealth During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Massaad¹,

Cherfan²

2020

Cureus

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“…We hope the government might build the database to collect the history epidemiology data, what could provide more reliable information. [21][22] Second, failure to exclude imported cases in the calculation of R t might make bias, but it could still re ect a certain epidemic situation and the effectiveness of prevention and intervention. Another limitation is that we used the time-series data of con rmed cases to calculate according to the o cial date of diagnosis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

China’s effective control and other countries’ uncharted challenge against COVID-19: an epidemiological and modelling study

Zheng

Qin

Chen

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Objective: In this study, we use the time-dependent reproduction number (Rt) to comprise the COVID transmissibility across different countries.Methods: We used data from Jan 20, 2019, to Feb 29, 2020, on the number of newly confirmed cases, obtained from the reports published by the CDC, to infer the incidence of infectious over time. A two-step procedure was used to estimate the Rt. The first step used data on known index-secondary cases pairs, from publicly available case reports, to estimate the serial interval distribution. The second step estimated the Rt jointly from the incidence data and the information data in the first step. Rt was then used to simulate the epidemics across all major cities in China and typical countries worldwide. Results: Based on a total of 126 index-secondary cases pairs from 4 international regions, we estimated that the serial interval for SARS-2-CoV was 4.18 (IQR 1.92 – 6.65) days. Domestically, Rt of China, Hubei province, Wuhan had fallen below 1.0 on 9 Feb, 10 Feb and 13 Feb (Rt were 0.99±0.02, 0.99±0.02 and 0.96±0.02), respectively. Internationally, as of 26 Feb, statistically significant periods of COVID spread (Rt >1) were identified for most regions, except for Singapore (Rt was 0.92±0.17).Conclusions: The epidemic in China has been well controlled, but the worldwide pandemic has not been well controlled. Worldwide preparedness and vulnerability against COVID-19 should be regarded with more care.

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“…The pandemic makes face-to-face intervention reduction necessary [7]. e-MH should be reinforced [27] because it increases accessibility and equity when MH staff are speci cally trained [28,29].…”

Section: Starace and Ferraramentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental Health Planning During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Review of Online International Strategies and Recommendations

Almeda

García‐Alonso

Salvador‐Carulla

2020

Preprint

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Background Mental Health care systems have been dramatically affected by COVID-19. Containment measures have been imposed with negative consequences on population mental health. Therefore, an increase in both symptomatology and mental disorders incidence is expected. This research aims to identify, describe and assess the empirical background on online strategies and recommendations developed by international organizations and governments to cope with the psychological impact of COVID-19. Methods A new questionnaire has been developed to identify the existence of common patterns in the selected documents. Questions were classified in three domains: COVID-19 information, mental health strategies and mental health recommendations. The PRISMA statements were adapted to review online documents. A two-steps cluster analysis was carried out to highlight underlying behaviors in data (patterns). Results were shown by using spider graphs (pattern profiles). Multidimensional links between questions were identified and assessed by conceptual maps. Results 26 documents were included in the review. The questionnaire assessed document complexity and identified key mental health issues (i.e. tools for dealing with stress, depression and anxiety), which show a high agreement level among them. Cluster analysis highlighted the existence of common patterns in the selected question domains. Strong relationships between individual questions were also identified such as, for example, include psychological tips for maintaining good mental health and coping with COVID-19 (question nº 4), describe some psychological skills to help people cope with anxiety and worry about COVID-19 (question nº 6) and, finally, promote social connection at home (question nº 8). Conclusions When fast results are needed to develop health strategies and policies, rapid reviews associated to statistical and graphical methods are essential. Results obtained from the proposed analytical procedures are relevant to a) classify the documents about the psychological impact of COVID-19, b) develop new documents according to the selected objectives for matching population needs, c) improve psychological interventions in a pandemic, and d) adapt new documents to local situations. The relevance of adapting e-mental health to community mental health care model principles was highlighted. For developing e-mental health potential, some problems related to the digital gap, stigma and ethical issues must be considered.

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Digital Mental Health and COVID-19: Using Technology Today to Accelerate the Curve on Access and Quality Tomorrow

Cited by 768 publications

References 38 publications

Social Media Data Analytics on Telehealth During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Social Media Data Analytics on Telehealth During the COVID-19 Pandemic

China’s effective control and other countries’ uncharted challenge against COVID-19: an epidemiological and modelling study

Mental Health Planning During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Review of Online International Strategies and Recommendations

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