Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jul 25, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 28, 2018 - Sep 6, 2018
Date Accepted: Oct 24, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A feasibility trial of Power Up: A smartphone app to support patient activation and shared decision making for mental health in young people
ABSTRACT
Background:
Digital tools have the potential to support patient activation and shared decision making in the face of increasing levels of mental health problems in young people. There is a need for feasibility trials of digital interventions to determine the usage and acceptability of interventions. In addition, there is a need to determine the ability to recruit and retain research participants to plan rigorous effectiveness trials and therefore, develop evidence-based recommendations for practice.
Objective:
To determine the feasibility of undertaking a cluster randomized control trial to test the effectiveness of a smartphone app, Power Up, co-designed with young people to support patient activation and shared decision making for mental health.
Methods:
Overall, 270 young people were screened for participation and 53% (N = 142) were recruited and completed baseline measures across eight specialist child mental health services (n = 62, mean (SD) age = 14.66 (1.99) years, 52% female) and two mainstream secondary schools (n = 80; mean (SD) age = 16.88 (0.68) years, 46% female). Young people received Power Up in addition to management as usual or received management as usual only. Post-trial interviews were conducted with 11 young people from the intervention arms (specialist services n = 6; schools n = 5).
Results:
Usage data showed that there were an estimated 50 (out of 64) users of Power Up in the intervention arms. Findings from the interviews indicated that young people found Power Up to be acceptable. Young people reported: 1) their motivation for use of Power Up, 2) the impact of use, and 3) barriers to use. Out of the 142 recruited participants, 45% (64/142) completed follow up measures, and the approaches to increase retention agreed by the steering group are discussed.
Conclusions:
The findings of the present research indicate that the app is acceptable and it is feasible to examine the effectiveness of Power Up in a prospective cluster randomized control trial. Clinical Trial: ISRCTN: ISRCTN77194423, ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02552797
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.