Digital Services for Maternal Mental Health
How can we better deliver mental health services to support perinatal women?
Timeline: 5 Months
Team: 5 researchers, 1 designer, 1 obstetrician, 1 care manager
Methods: contextual inquiry, interviews, journey mapping, qualitative analysis
Opportunity
A large hospital in the United States offers mental health services through their OB/GYN clinic. A team of healthcare providers delivers these services for perinatal (i.e., pregnant and postpartum) women. The prevalence of perinatal mental health issues is high, and the demand for mental health care exceeds the capacity of its healthcare providers. As a result, patients are not receiving the care they need.
Goals
In partnership with this hospital’s OB/GYN clinic, I set out to achieve two goals:
Define the challenges healthcare providers face in delivering mental health services for perinatal women.
Explore how digital services can support healthcare providers in efficiently and effectively delivering mental health services.
methods
First, I conducted contextual inquiries with care managers—who have a central role in coordinating mental health services—to understand their workflow, decision-making, and collaboration practices with the clinic’s OB/GYN and mental health providers.
During a contextual inquiry session, a care manager documents mental health symptom screens in the electronic health record.
Second, I completed interviews with care managers and other healthcare providers (e.g., obstetricians, therapists, psychiatrists) to learn their perspective on how they deliver mental health care, what challenges they face in their work, and how to improve their current processes.
After collecting this data, I led a qualitative analysis of the contextual inquiry notes and interviews with another researcher. We created a journey map to synthesize each participant’s processes, pain points, and opportunities for technologies to address these pain points.
findings & key insights
Care managers and healthcare providers face several major challenges in delivering mental health services to perinatal women.
For example, the high volume of patients mean the clinic has difficulty prioritizing women who most urgently need care, personalizing women’s treatment plans, and staying in touch with women long-term to see if their treatment plan is working.
“People don’t respond to my [messages]. Personally I would like to see a way that we could check in via text with people, or through an app…”
Care Manager
Outcomes & Impact
Based on these findings, I developed the following design recommendations for technologies to help care managers and healthcare providers deliver mental health services to their patients:
Auto-alert care managers when a patient has a concerning change to their symptoms so care managers can check-in.
Create at-a-glance patient summaries of relevant details that providers must know before taking to the patient.
Have patients convey their communication preferences to care managers.
Allow care managers to note patients who need check-ins after experiencing a life event that could impact symptoms or treatment.
I created a series of mockups of a technology that incorporates these recommendations, so that my team and the clinic could discuss concrete next steps for designing and building future solutions.
One mockup of a technology that incorporates some of the design recommendations derived from research, including ways to alert care managers to patients with concerning symptom changes, a summary of patient details, and messages that are sent in a time/format that accommodate patients’ communication preferences.
As of spring 2021, mid- and high-fidelity prototypes of this technology are in development. This technology will then be deployed in the clinic to test whether it will successfully address challenges and improve patient health outcomes.
Header image: maternity by Comeheresailartis.t from the Noun Project