Why Digital Mental Health Tools Fail: The Clinician Factor
A study of therapists and researchers building mental health apps reveals a critical gap: technologists often ignore how organizations actually work. When designers neglected real-world operational constraints during testing, projects collapsed. The finding matters because mental health systems planning billions on digital transformation now have a roadmap for avoiding costly failures.
Originaltitel: Towards mHealth Systems for Support of Psychotherapeutic Practice: A Qualitative Study of Researcher-Clinician Collaboration in System Design and Evaluation.
<p>We examined clinicians' and researchers' experiences from participation in collaborative research on the introduction of Internet and mobile information systems (mHealth systems) in psychotherapeutic routines. The study used grounded theory methodology and was set in a collaboration that aimed to develop and evaluate mHealth support of psychotherapy provided to young people. Soundness of the central objects developed in the design phase (the collaboration contract, the trial protocol, and the system technology) was a necessary foundation for successful collaborative mHealth research; neglect of unanticipated organizational influences during the trial phase was a factor in collaboration failure. The experiences gained in this study can be used in settings where collaborative research on mHealth systems in mental health is planned.</p>