Mental Health Apps
What separates the cream of the crop from the rest when it comes to mental health apps?
Xcertia, Inc. was a collaboration between HIMSS, the AMA, the American Heart Association and DHX group that published guidelines in 2019 on how to create safe and effective development structures for health apps.
Their five principles are certainly applicable for any mental health app that wants to be taken seriously. Those guidelines are the following:
Privacy. Assess whether a health app protects the user’s information in full compliance with all applicable laws, rules and regulations
Security. Assess if the application is protected from external threats and maintain the integrity, availability, confidentiality and resilience of the data
Operability. Assess whether a mobile health app installs, loads, runs and interoperates in a manner that provides a reasonable user experience on mobile and web platforms while also integrating with existing health IT
Usability. Assess how a health app is designed to be safe and easy to use
Content. Assess whether the information provided in the application is current and accurate
What we love about these guidelines is that they include the basics like HIPAA compliance and EHR integration, but go beyond those to include user experience and ease of use.
A health app can check all the right boxes, but if it doesn’t get users to engage with it in a meaningful way, it isn’t going to do any good.
These five guidelines are what providers should be using to assess any new mental health app that they want to integrate into their workflow.
It includes nonstarters like security as well as primary considerations like clinical effectiveness.
And if an app doesn’t check all of these boxes? It isn’t worth consideration for implementation into your workflow.
So how can you determine whether any particular app meets the criteria set forth by Xcertia?
There’s a tool we love at SageSurfer called the ONE MIND PsyberGuide that rates particular mental health apps across a number of criteria.
All apps are ranked across criteria such as credibility, user experience, and transparency. Many of the apps also have professional reviews attached where real clinicians put the app to use and report on its effectiveness.
PsyberGuide also gives you criteria to use to filter apps – so if you only want to see anxiety apps, or apps that are useful for substance abuse, you can do so.
You can check out the PsyberGuide resource, as well as the Xcertia guidelines, below!
https://onemindpsyberguide.org/apps/
https://www.himss.org/news/himss-continues-improving-health-app-effectiveness-and-safety