Data sharing: pilot study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Adolescence, digital technology and mental health care: case studies of the Meetwo App interfacing with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to enrich clinical history taking.
IRAS ID
285021
Contact name
Lucy Biddle
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Bristol
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 10 months, days
Research summary
Young people's use of digital technology is prolific and shows both benefits and harms to individual users. Digital technology is also increasingly used in mental health settings to deliver therapeutic interventions and has a key role in understanding and improving young people's mental well-being. Young people’s technology use has the potential therefore to provide a tool to enhance the clinical encounter, for example; it is suggested that apps could interface with mental health services to facilitate clinical history taking, and to provide an initial online ‘encounter’ prior to face-to-face consultation. Such innovations provide an opportunity to improve efficiency and add therapeutic value. However, these applications have not yet been systematically explored.
We will conduct a pilot study to explore the potential to draw upon young people's digital technology use (in this case, their posts on a young person's mental health app, 'MeeTwo') as a means of informing clinical history taking and triage. In collaboration with MeeTwo, we will interview 5 young people and clinician pairs, where the young person has used MeeTwo and shares a summary of their data from the app with their clinician at their first clinical encounter. We will also interview 5 young people who choose not to share their data. Interviews will explore the experience and acceptability of data sharing from the young person and clinician's perspective, including any advantages and disadvantages, and will be used to generate case studies about the potential for data sharing to enhance clinician history-taking for young people experiencing mental health difficulties.REC name
HSC REC B
REC reference
20/NI/0151
Date of REC Opinion
15 Dec 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion