App Design

What is DepCare?

An app to connect patients to mental health treatment during visits with their primary care providers.

At Columbia University Medical Center, I worked with a team of doctors, researchers, and developers to create DepCare. I led design changes and created the tool flow and the educational resource guide. Additionally, I filmed and edited videos of patients and providers featured in the app. I also recorded and edited the voiceover to assist users in navigating DepCare. Extensive user research was conducted, making the app easy to use and valuable to patients. Throughout the process, I worked with the developers to ensure that changes were made accurately.

Background

Sustainable models for integrating mental health in primary care have been limited by suboptimal mental health screening, lack of primary care provider time for quality discussions, limited resources/access and patient stigma and treatment misconceptions. In response, a multidisciplinary team of providers, patients, and mental health workers in the ACN created DepCare, a personalized, culturally tailored, web-based application aimed at improving depression screening, education and management in primary care settings. DepCare uses a crossover design to test a multi-level optimization strategy centered around a tool for improving screening, patient activation, and automated shared decision-making, as well as provider education/feedback, to improve the delivery of care for depression by internists in primary care clinics across NYPH. The intervention combines cutting edge implementation science methods, based on transtheoretical behavioral change frameworks and user-centered design principles, to design an intervention tailored to address patient-, provider- and clinic-level barriers to maximize depression treatment optimization (AHRQ Moise PI).