Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Sep 11, 2019
Date Accepted: Mar 28, 2020
How could mobile technology relieve the urgent mental health needs in China: perspectives from different stakeholders
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the rapid development of information technology and mobile devices, more and more mobile medical services and platforms have emerged. However, with China's current mental health situation, how to provide more patient-centered services with all the challenges and opportunities needs discussion and research.
Objective:
To explore mental health services stakeholders’ attitudes and preferences on mobile mental health services, and discuss challenges and opportunities faced by mobile technology developers under nowadays mental health environment in China.
Methods:
A convenient sampled online survey was conducted following CHERRIES checklist. A total of 586 valid questionnaires were collected, includes 184 patients and family members, 225 mental health workers, and 177 people from general public. Data analysis was completed by SPSS24.0.
Results:
Among various perceived problems towards today's mental health medical environment, the difficulty in finding proper psychologists and the limited visit time ranked the highest. Social media (64.85%) are the most popular platform among all participants, while professionals have more intention to use smartphone Apps (75.10%). Professional instruction, psychological consultation, and mental health education (ranked top 3) are mostly identified needs. In terms of differences on preferred needs, mental health professionals generally have more emphasize on therapeutic items, especially medication reminder(χ2=70.741, p<.001) and symptom monitor(χ2=24.005, p<.001), mental health resources(χ2=38.558, p<.001), and peer support(χ2=19.019, p<.001), while patients and family members focus more on convenient online prescription (χ2=7.693, p=.021), and general public on online psychological consultation(χ2=23.102, p<.001) and mental health knowledge(χ2=9.087, p=.011). Almost half of the participants regard online mental health services as highly acceptable or support to use, but less than 30% of participants think online mental health services might be very helpful, while almost half of them believe fairly help. Concerns on mobile mental health mainly focus on information security. Service receivers also suspected the quality and professionalism of contents, and mental health professionals also worried about the time and energy consumption, as well as medical safety.
Conclusions:
In terms of service flow, mobile services could be used to expand service time and improve efficiency both before and after diagnose. More categories of mobile services that are urgently needed by patients and general public should be developed. Multidisciplinary materials such as social work and occupational therapy could be provided to facilitate the integration and cooperation of more well-rounded service teams. Standard medical record system and data format will better promote the development of future intelligent medical care. How to ensure service quality, solve safety issues, and better integrate with regular medical workflows are problems should be addressed while prospering.
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