Care Coordination and Passive Mobile Data Monitoring to Improve Mental Health Care

Providing care to individuals with serious mental illness can be challenging, requiring ongoing monitoring, treatment adjustments, and coordination of various medical and social services. Rates of emergency service and hospital use are high due to unexpected social, medical, and mental health crises. Stressors and poor adherence with treatment are common and can lead to rapid worsening in symptoms, job loss, homelessness, incarceration, or suicide. Clinician visits can be infrequent. Patient-clinician contact between visits is challenging and often nonexistent. As such, illness exacerbations usually occur with no clinician awareness in real time, leaving limited opportunity to provide services. Clinicians need interventions that are capable of monitoring and quickly detecting worsening behaviors and illness, to improve care coordination, outreach, and treatment. This project studies the effectiveness of enhanced care coordination using passive mobile data monitoring and support from peer specialists, with the goal of improving outcomes and reducing the need for acute care.