Can technology help us stay on track with treatment without making it a burden?

If you are receiving mental health treatment, you probably know that it is not just about dealing with symptoms. You also need to attend appointments, remember instructions, cope with possible relapses, and monitor your own progress. All while staying motivated throughout a process that can be lengthy and does not always follow a straight path.

This burden is not limited to symptoms or treatment itself. It also includes the time, effort, and resources patients must devote to managing their healthcare, a concept known as treatment burden (Demain et al., 2020).

In this context, technology can become an ally. Some tools can make certain tasks easier and help maintain continuity of treatment without adding unnecessary effort.

But the opposite can also happen. If a tool demands too much attention, time, or interaction, it can become an additional concern for the patient. Technology can reduce the burden of treatment, but it can also create a new one.

When technology adds to the burden

Using technologies such as artificial intelligence in mental healthcare does not, in itself, improve the patient's experience. For a tool to be truly useful, it must be designed to make the process easier rather than become yet another task.

Some features can make a digital tool harder to incorporate into daily life:

• Questionnaires that are too frequent.
• Complex apps.
• Too many notifications.
• The need to constantly enter information.
• Unintuitive interfaces.
• Interactions that have no clear purpose for the patient.

A tool that requires too much effort can end up becoming another barrier to treatment. It can have the opposite effect from what was intended: adding another task to a process that already requires time, attention, and effort.

Evidence on digital mental health interventions also indicates that factors such as technical problems and a lack of personalization can make user engagement more difficult (Borghouts et al., 2021). That is why incorporating technology into treatment is not enough: it is also necessary to consider how it is used and how much effort it requires from the patient.

What makes a tool truly useful?

For a tool to support patients throughout their treatment, it should meet specific criteria.

It should be simple and require little effort to use. Taking a long time to learn and being cumbersome to use are two factors that discourage adoption, so the tool should be easy and efficient to use. It is also important that it adapt to the patient, taking into account their abilities, habits, and digital needs. These factors vary from patient to patient, and technology must be able to work effectively across different social groups.

Patient motivation is very important during the recovery process. In this regard, clearly and consistently explaining the goal of the process helps patients understand what they are working on and where they are in that process. Finally, there is the relationship with the healthcare professional. Although the tool should focus on the patient's use, the importance of also connecting it with the clinician cannot be overlooked. The professional should be able to receive all the information generated through interactions between the user and the tool so they can better understand the patient's progress and needs.

Technology should fit into the patient's life while disrupting their habits as little as possible. Its role should not be to ask them to do more, but to make certain tasks easier and help them stay connected to their care.

Technology can help maintain the connection

Important changes in a patient's condition can occur between appointments. Some symptoms may improve or worsen, new difficulties may arise, or situations may occur that the patient considers important to communicate.

A simple tool can make it easier to record or communicate certain changes during that period, without necessarily having to wait until the next appointment. This can also help reduce reliance on memory when reconstructing weeks of progress during a visit.

A well-designed tool can make it easier to monitor certain aspects of the patient's progress more continuously. The interactions that take place throughout the process can become an additional source of information for the professional that might otherwise be unavailable.

In addition, the available evidence suggests a relationship between the level of engagement with digital mental health interventions and their outcomes, reinforcing the importance of designing tools that patients can use consistently over time (Gan et al., 2021).

But maintaining this connection does not mean replacing the relationship between patient and professional. Technology can serve as an additional point of connection between them, without replacing the clinical encounter or shifting responsibility for the care process onto the patient.

Less effort, not less participation

The best technology for mental healthcare is not necessarily the one that does the most, but the one that reduces the number of unnecessary tasks patients must perform to stay connected to their care.

Doing less does not mean participating less in treatment. It means eliminating efforts that add no value and making it easier to engage in interactions that can contribute to the process.

This is one of the principles behind tools like Nexi Health: making patient interaction easier and collecting relevant information throughout the process without turning follow-up into a new burden.

Because when technology is properly integrated into treatment, its value should not be measured by how much the patient does with it, but by how much it helps them continue with what truly matters: their recovery process. At Nexi, we work to support patients throughout the complex process of mental health recovery and help them feel supported every step of the way.

References

• Borghouts, J., Eikey, E., Mark, G., De Leon, C., Schueller, S. M., Schneider, M., Stadnick, N., Zheng, K., Mukamel, D., & Sorkin, D. H. (2021). Barriers to and facilitators of user engagement with digital mental health interventions: Systematic review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(3), e24387. https://doi.org/10.2196/24387
• Demain, S., Gonçalves, A.-C., Areia, C., Oliveira, R., Marcos, A. J., Zhang, J., & Green, M. (2020). A systematic literature review looking for the definition of treatment burden. Heliyon, 6(4), e03641. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03641
• Gan, D. Z. Q., McGillivray, L., Han, J., Christensen, H., & Torok, M. (2021). Effect of engagement with digital interventions on mental health outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Digital Health, 3, 764079. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2021.764079