How to use technology as part of your mental health strategy

When I'm working with clients helping put their health, mental health and wellbeing strategies in place, or I'm out speaking at conferences, I often have people coming up to me, and asking me about how to use technology in their health or mental health strategy.

What I hear a lot is people wanting to buy apps people want to put tech in, and what do I think about it? So this month, I'm gonna be dedicating my topic of conversation to being around technology, I spent my 20s, building a health and mental health app and putting mental health support into organisational internets. And one of the things that interested me about the mental health tech market is how slow it's taken to develop, we're now seeing lots of people launching apps, launching technology, launching bits and pieces, and it's far less than I thought we'd be out by now. But I'm gonna focus now on the good and the bad of tech, whether or not is useful to use in a strategy and how you do that.

So the first thing I say to anyone thinking when you're using an app or technology within their house or mental health strategy, is to stop and think why mental health is quite a human interaction. And so by moving people onto technology, you're actually taking away that face to face. And we're seeing a lot of reports at the moment about the use of social media about how the impact that technology has on us.

So by making it a pivotal part of your health and mental health strategy, you're actually encouraging people to be on their phones and on social media and using technology and away from people. Whereas actually, you could be doing the opposite.

That said, I fully recognise that technology is a fantastic tool for reaching people, it's confidential, you can have apps in your pocket, and you can quickly reach many of your employees. So what I'd like to do is unpack exactly what you should be doing and how you can use an app.

The second thing I say is, I hear lots of people saying they just want to buy their employees, headspace, or minds or car or one of the many things that we've got. And what do I think? And what I think is that technology can be great as an integrated part of a strategy. But you need to get your basics in.

First, you need to understand what your organisational approach to health, mental health and well being is, you need to put some structure in how are you supporting people, how you looking after people, what is your health promotion and prevention work? And then you need to see where technology can fit.

What I see is people coming up to me asking me whether I think that then by all of their population, headspace is going to fix mental health. It will not technology are an app is not a silver bullet, but can be a really useful part of an integrated strategy, when you've decided what gap is going to fill, and how technology is going to reach people in ways that other parts of your strategy isn't only from there, should you think about how or what you're going to use.

So the final thing I'd like to say about using technology into your strategy is is how you implement it. That's the key. I see lots of organisations spending a lot of money on technology or apps and then promoting it to staff and that the utilisation is quite low, or that many of their employees don't know that they have this subscription or they want something else to use. And also, with technology moving so fast, you can spend a lot of time and energy implementing something that seemed quite quickly outdated.

The key is if you want technology to be a useful part of your health and mental health strategy, you need to build it into your HR systems and processes. You need to let people know it's there. It needs to be part of your care pathways, your line managers and employees need to know how to use it.

So in my article next week, I'm going to be explaining how you can use technology to work for you. And also I'm going to be talking about data because don't forget the business model of many of these tech and app firms is to collect your data for their business model and that might not be something that's appropriate for you or your employees.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts, your comments below. And next week, I'll be teaching you how to embed technology and apps in a way that actually works and is good value for money.

Do you want support and guidance with an expert in the field? Mentorship with Amy McKeown is available - check out more info HERE