Using Digital Technologies to Facilitate Care Coordination Between Youth Mental Health Services: A Guide for Implementation

Abstract

Enhanced care coordination is essential to improving access to and navigation between youth mental health services. By facilitating better communication and coordination within and between youth mental health services, the goal is to guide young people quickly to the level of care they need and reduce instances of those receiving inappropriate care (too much or too little), or no care at all. Yet, it is often unclear how this goal can be achieved in a scalable way in local regions. We recommend using technology-enabled care coordination to facilitate streamlined transitions for young people across primary, secondary, more specialised or hospital-based care. First, we describe how technology-enabled care coordination could be achieved through two fundamental shifts in current service provisions; a model of care which puts the person at the centre of their care; and a technology infrastructure that facilitates this model. Second, we detail how dynamic simulation modelling can be used to rapidly test the operational features of implementation and the likely impacts of technology-enabled care coordination in a local service environment. Combined with traditional implementation research, dynamic simulation modelling can facilitate the transformation of real-world services. This work demonstrates the benefits of creating a smart health service infrastructure with embedded dynamic simulation modelling to improve operational efficiency and clinical outcomes through participatory and data driven health service planning.

Clinical staging and the differential risks for clinical and functional outcomes in young people presenting for youth mental health care

“…Digital technologies can be used as a scalable solution to facilitate multidimensional assessment at entry into care and for ongoing monitoring, which can promote a change in care plan that is tailored to the individual's needs [49][50][51]. Consequently, young people may receive more timely care that prevents the progression of illness and its associated risk of poorer outcomes [49].…”

“…Digital technologies can be used as a scalable solution to facilitate multidimensional assessment at entry into care and for ongoing monitoring, which can promote a change in care plan that is tailored to the individual's needs [49][50][51]. Consequently, young people may receive more timely care that prevents the progression of illness and its associated risk of poorer outcomes [49]. Future work should aim to highlight the effect of digitally supported care coordination on longitudinal outcomes in Some limitations of this study should be considered alongside our findings.…”

Human-Computer Interaction in Digital Mental Health

“…The use of multimodal digital platforms for Technology Enabled Clinical Care (TECC) [156] and informatics infrastructure [157] are emerging as ways to assist faster and better mental health care pathways including for severe psychological distress and suicidality. A fundamental issue is how to not continue adding to the array of digital platforms, apps and electronic medical record systems that are effectively serving in isolation from one another [156].…”

“…The use of multimodal digital platforms for Technology Enabled Clinical Care (TECC) [156] and informatics infrastructure [157] are emerging as ways to assist faster and better mental health care pathways including for severe psychological distress and suicidality. A fundamental issue is how to not continue adding to the array of digital platforms, apps and electronic medical record systems that are effectively serving in isolation from one another [156]. The design and development of TECC using dynamic simulation modelling and health service implementation research is crucial to how these technologies are adopted and implemented if service efficiency developments and clinical outcomes are to be attained, especially for youth mental health services [156].…”

“…A fundamental issue is how to not continue adding to the array of digital platforms, apps and electronic medical record systems that are effectively serving in isolation from one another [156]. The design and development of TECC using dynamic simulation modelling and health service implementation research is crucial to how these technologies are adopted and implemented if service efficiency developments and clinical outcomes are to be attained, especially for youth mental health services [156]. The building and testing of HCI models of the UI components for different types of digital health interventions (i.e., predictive HCI modeling of applications) and the development and evaluation of UI for digital health systems such as electronic health record systems was proposed to add to HCD processes and heuristics techniques [158].…”