Testing a Dashboard Intervention for Tracking Digital Social Media Activity in Clinical Care of Individuals With Mood and Anxiety Disorders: Protocol and Design Considerations for a Pragmatic Randomized Trial.

Background: Mood and anxiety disorders are prevalent mental health diagnoses. Numerous studies have shown that measurement-based care, which is used to monitor patient symptoms, functioning, and treatment progress and help guide clinical decisions and collaboration on treatment goals, can improve outcomes in patients with these disorders. Including digital information regarding patients' electronic communications and social media activity is an innovative approach to augmenting measurement-based care. Recent data indicate interest and willingness from both mental health clinicians and patients to share this type of digital information in treatment sessions. However, the clinical benefit of systematically doing this has been minimally evaluated.

Objective: This study aims to develop an electronic dashboard for tracking patients' digital social activity and a protocol for a pragmatic randomized trial to test the feasibility and efficacy of using the dashboard in real-world clinical care of patients with depression or anxiety disorders.

Methods: We developed a personalized electronic dashboard that tracks patients' electronic communications and social media activity, visualizes data on these interactions through key graphics and figures, and provides a tool that can be readily integrated into routine clinical care for use by clinicians and patients during treatment sessions. We then designed a randomized trial to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of using the electronic dashboard in real-world care compared to treatment as usual. The trial included patients aged ≥12 years with a mood or anxiety disorder who were receiving treatment in outpatient psychiatry clinics in the Johns Hopkins Health System and the Kennedy Krieger Institute. The primary outcome includes changes in patient-rated depression symptoms. Secondary outcomes include changes in patient-rated anxiety symptoms and overall functioning. Exploratory analyses examine the impact of the intervention on measures of therapeutic alliance and the detection of clinically actionable targets.

Results: We successfully developed an electronic dashboard for tracking patients' electronic communications and social media activity, and we implemented a protocol for evaluating the feasibility and efficacy of using the dashboard in routine care for mood or anxiety disorders. The protocol was approved by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Institutional Review Board. In this study, we report the technological, ethical, and pragmatic considerations in developing the dashboard and testing it in a real-world setting.

Conclusions: The integration of an electronic dashboard to monitor digital social activity in mental health care treatment is novel. This study examines the feasibility and effectiveness of the dashboard and the challenges in implementing this protocol. The lessons learned from developing and implementing the study will inform ongoing discussions about the value of gathering collateral information on patients' digital social activity and how to do so in a way that is acceptable and clinically effective.

Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03925038; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03925038.

International Registered Report Identifier (irrid): DERR1-10.2196/63279.