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Key points
- Mental health professionals support technology, but concerns remain.
- Tools to help ease clinician demand and burden are most favorable.
- Some 77 percent still wonder if digital data can be actionable.
Digital technology has the potential to transform psychiatry, but adoption has been slow.
Over the past few years, there has been significant progress in using digital technology to inform clinical care. Examples include videos and voice recordings from patient interviews to help diagnose psychiatric conditions, wearable tech to help passively track and monitor important changes in behavior, as well as online activity data from search histories and social media to monitor important changes in thoughts and emotions. This information is increasingly being recognized as important adjunctive clinically meaningful data that has the potential to transform psychiatry and more to objectively identify patterns relevant to clinical care.
Despite their enormous potential, adoption has been challenging. Clinicians and patients alike are excited and reluctant to incorporate digital data into clinical care. Objective digital data, like the frequency of online activity, the content and language uploaded to social media, and sleep and physical activity biometrics from wearables, have the power to arm clinicians with important patient information. Understanding barriers and facilitators to adopt new technologies that support their implementation is essential.
Concerns like ethics, privacy, and security always remain top of mind, but is there one thing holding back this field of medicine?
To better understand the thought process, colleagues and I polled nearly 140 clinicians, promoting them with questions about the use of technology, social media, and digital data, how to harness it, and their concerns for our future. We recently published the results of this illuminating study in the journal Advancing Digital Health and Open Science.
The results showed:
83 percent believe that these data could improve their practice.
23 percent said that they had viewed patients’ profiles on social media.
Hopeful benefits include self-monitoring and more effective and efficient clinical intervention support as most promising.
Anticipated challenges of embracing new technology and digital data tools include: 88.5 percent of responders are concerned about the potential for greater clinician time demand and burden, and 77 percent still wonder if digital data can be actionable.
What does it mean?
Overall, while clinicians report a positive attitude toward using digital data to improve patient care and outcomes, they are aware and highlight barriers that must be overcome before digital data can reach its full potential. This study shows that clinicians are strongly interested in technology that can reduce clinician burden.
As noted from the survey, clinicians have high hopes for these methods and tools. Still, there needs to be a consistent and proper way to analyze, scrutinize, and eventually implement these practices before they are welcomed with open arms.
While COVID-19 has shown the world the power telepsychiatry holds, this survey underscores the need for clinician engagement and education as digital data platforms are developed before they are fully embraced and used. Only time, education, and acceptance will lead to a more modern approach to mental health.
