Development and acceptability of a mobile health application integrated with the electronic heath record for treatment of chronic insomnia disorder.

Study Objectives: To describe the development and feasibility of a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) program delivered via personal digital devices and fully integrated with the electronic health record (EHR).

Methods: A multidisciplinary team of clinicians and members of our Center for Digital Health collaborated to develop a Chronic Insomnia Interactive Care Plan (ChI-ICP), an application that provides personalized and just in time education and promotes self-management using CBT-I concepts, and is activated from and fully integrated into the EHR. Following development, we evaluated patient engagement and workflows, assessed changes to provider workload, and examined outcomes on measures of insomnia during a pilot deployment of the application.

Results: A total of 222 patients were enrolled and 179 engaged with the plan during the 3-month pilot program. Enrolled patients generated an average of 3.9 ± 2.3 In Basket messages, most being automated notifications related to noncompletion of assigned tasks, while only a few were related to patients requesting additional training or help with insomnia. Sleep efficiency improved from baseline until the completion of the program from 74.5% ± 16.7% to 87.6% ± 10.8% ( = .001), and the Insomnia Severity Index improved from 14.9 ± 5.22 to 11.6 ± 4.80 ( = .006).

Conclusions: In this pilot implementation of an integrated ChI-ICP, patient engagement was favorable, workflows and workload were not significantly burdensome for the care teams, and initial evaluation of efficacy was favorable. This provides evidence for an application that is a scalable method to assist patients with chronic insomnia and future work should assess its efficacy in controlled trials.

Citation: Morgenthaler TI, Kolla BP, Anderson SE, et al. Development and acceptability of a mobile health application integrated with the electronic heath record for treatment of chronic insomnia disorder. . 2022;18(12):2785-2792.