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A Telehealth Framework for Mobile Health, Smartphones, and Apps: Competencies, Training, and Faculty Development

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Abstract

Technologies like smartphones and apps are reshaping life, health care, and business. Clinicians need skills, knowledge, and attitudes to ensure quality care and to supervise the current generation of trainees, consistent with the Institute of Medicine’s Health Professions Educational Summit. Literature is integrated on patient-, learner-, competency-, and outcome-based themes from the fields of technology, health care, pedagogy, and business. Mobile health, smartphone/device, and app competencies are organized in the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Milestone domains of patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, systems-based practice, professionalism, and interpersonal skills and communication. Teaching methods are suggested to align competency outcomes, learning context, and evaluation. Services by mobile health, smartphone/device, and apps have a broader scope than in-person and telehealth and telebehavioral health care. This includes clinical decision support in medicine, hybrid delivery, and integration across health systems’ e-platforms. A curriculum with seminar, case- and problem-based teaching, supervision, evaluation, and quality improvement practices is needed to achieve competency outcomes. Clinicians have to adjust assessment, triage and treatment and attend to ethical, privacy, security, and other challenges. Health systems need to manage change, proactively plan faculty development, and create a positive e-culture for learning. Research is needed on implementing and evaluating mobile health competencies for this significant paradigm shift in health care.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of the American Association of Medical Colleges, Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, American Psychiatric Association Committee on Telepsychiatry, American Telemedicine Association and the Telemental Health Interest Group, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Davis School of Medicine, and Northern California Veterans Health Care System and Mental Health Service.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mental Health, Northern California Veterans Administration Health Care System, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, University of California Davis, 10535 Hospital Way, Mather, CA, 95655, USA

    Donald M. Hilty

  2. Addiction Treatment Services, Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, University of California, 3801 Miranda Ave, Building 520F, Mail Code 116A, Palo Alto, CA, 94304, USA

    Steven Chan

  3. Digital Psychiatry Division, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    John Torous

  4. UC Riverside Department of Psychiatry, UCR Health at Citrus Tower, 3390 University Avenue, Suite 115, Riverside, CA, 92501, USA

    John Luo

  5. Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 60 Fenwood Road, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Robert J. Boland

  6. Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Robert J. Boland

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Hilty, D.M., Chan, S., Torous, J. et al. A Telehealth Framework for Mobile Health, Smartphones, and Apps: Competencies, Training, and Faculty Development. J. technol. behav. sci. 4, 106–123 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-019-00091-0

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