Digital mental health interventions have the potential to transform mental health services through improved access to evidence-based resources and interventions, providing novel therapies and automating parts of diagnostic, monitoring and treatment pathways. Effective, usable and accessible digital innovations could redress the current treatment gaps and ensure that evidence-based interventions reach the people who need them most. However, this potential is still largely unrealised in clinical practice. Many commercially developed digital interventions and services available in the marketplace have minimal evidence base and some could even be harmful. Meanwhile, academic-led evidence-based digital interventions are available, but few, if any, have shown sustained uptake and deployment in real-world settings, and many are not available to the public. The challenge is to close this academic/commercial divide and research to practice gap, creating an efficient pipeline of usable and effective digital mental health interventions that address clinical unmet needs, reduce health inequalities and can be deployed at scale in real-world settings to improve service efficiency and people’s mental health outcomes.
Chair: Dr Subodh Dave, Dean, Royal College of Psychiatrists, United Kingdom
Professor Chris Hollis, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Digital Mental Health, Director, NIHR MindTech MedTech Co-operative, University of Nottingham
