Developing the Workforce of the Digital Future: Leveraging Technology to Train Community-Based Mobile Mental Health Specialists

Abstract

Challenges in training, dissemination, and implementation have impeded the ability of providers to integrate promising digital health tools in real-world services. There is a need for generalizable strategies to rapidly train real-world providers at scale to support the adoption of digital health. This study describes the development of principles guiding rapid training of community-based clinicians in the support of digital health. This training approach was developed in the context of an ongoing trial examining implementation strategies for FOCUS, a mobile mental health intervention designed for people with serious mental illness. The SAIL (Simple, Accessible, Inverted, Live) model introduces how digital tools can be leveraged to facilitate rapid training of community agency-based personnel to serve as digital mental health champions, promoters, and providers. This model emphasizes simple and flexible principles of intervention delivery, accessible materials in a virtual learning environment, inverted or “flipped” live training structure, and live consultation calls for ongoing support. These initial insights lay the groundwork for future work to test and replicate generalizable training strategies focused on real-world delivery of digital mental health services. These strategies have the potential to remove key obstacles to the implementation and dissemination of digital health interventions for mental health.