Mental health information management platform

The core value of the mental health information management platform is not simply to move psychological assessment and file management from offline to online, but to serve as a digital hub to open up the entire chain of screening, early warning, intervention, and follow-up. While maintaining the red line of privacy compliance, it solves the common pain points of traditional psychological services of "narrow coverage, low efficiency, and many faults" - but it is not a panacea. 90% of the implementation effect depends on scene adaptability and operating rules, rather than the technology itself.

Last year, I helped a higher vocational school in the south implement a platform with a capacity of 10,000 people. What was the state of their psychological assessment before? At the beginning of each semester, counselors go to each class with a stack of SCL-90 scales. It takes two weeks to collect them and record them in Excel. It takes another week to complete the statistics and then screen the early warning list. By the time they find the students, some have been suffering from insomnia for more than a month and have even committed self-harm twice. After changing to an information platform, students scanned a QR code to register for school and filled it out in 10 minutes. The system calculated scores and grades in real time. The early warning list was pushed to the corresponding counselors and psychology center teachers on the same day. Three students with high suicide risk were intervened in advance during the beginning of this year. Follow-up visits were also recorded in the system, so there was no need to dig through a pile of paper files to find records.

But to be honest, this thing has been criticized a lot since it appeared. The circle is divided into two groups and they are arguing fiercely. There is still no unified conclusion. Many old academic professors are particularly disgusted with the "data-only" tendency of many platforms on the market: I have seen a manufacturer advertise that it can judge emotional states based on students' campus card consumption records, access control frequency, and even social platform comments. Not to mention whether privacy is compliant or not, the psychological state itself is extremely subjective and dynamic. , some students just went to the library during the final week and did not go out, so the system marked them as "high risk for depression", which added unnecessary workload to the teachers. Not to mention that many people deliberately concealed their true status and deliberately filled in "completely normal" in order not to be treated specially. No one can say how accurate the screening is. But those who are involved in the implementation of the industry have another argument: Many of the primary and secondary schools I have contacted in third- and fourth-tier cities do not even have full-time psychological teachers. In the past, they could not even conduct full-coverage screening once a year. Now the platform can screen out at least 80% of obvious risk points. The remaining fish that have slipped through the net are problems that traditional manual screening cannot solve. It is better to overcome the "from 0 to 1" hurdle first and then talk about the accuracy of "from 1 to 100" than to do nothing.

I have run more than 20 implementation projects myself, and my biggest feeling is: there is no good "universal version" of the platform, and adapting to the scene is the key. If the platform you use for an enterprise dares to let HR see employees' psychological assessment results, no one will dare to fill them in. "Data isolation" must be implemented. Only the third-party EAP consultants can see the employee's assessment records. For mild anxiety, we will offer free meditation classes and sleep guidance. For severe anxiety, we will directly arrange offline consultations for you. Only by not disclosing the entire process to the company can we truly collect real data. For a platform for the elderly in the community, instead of having a complicated scale with dozens of questions, change it to voice questions and answers, asking "Have you had trouble sleeping recently?" It is also used in mental health institutions. The core is to connect with the HIS system. The assessment results of the visitor's initial diagnosis are directly synchronized with the doctor. During the follow-up, the system automatically sends reminders. There is no need for doctors to call each one to ask about the current situation. The time saved can be used to treat several more patients.

Of course, there have been many pitfalls. When it was implemented for a public school, the manufacturer initially granted full permissions to the administrator by default. The director of the Moral Education Department could easily see the assessment details of all students. Later, the teacher of the psychology center firmly stopped it, and finally changed it to three-level permissions: counselors can only see the warning levels of students in their own class, but cannot see the specific answers to the questions.； Only counselors in the psychology center can view the complete file of the corresponding visiting student. ； The administrator can only see the overall statistical data and cannot see any personal information. All operation traces and who has viewed the files are recorded. This complies with the privacy protection requirements of the Mental Health Law. To put it bluntly, many units buy platforms purely to cope with inspections. After buying them, they just throw them there and never use them once a year. No matter how good the platform is, it is just a decoration.

Now this track is still slowly grinding, and there is no unified standard answer. Some people think that we should build a large platform with full functions and install all the requirements. ； Some people just want a lightweight version that can do screening and follow-up. In essence, this platform is just a tool, just like the sandbox and scale in the hands of psychological counselors. Whether it can help people is never determined by the tool, but by the person using the tool, whether they really want to put psychological services into practice.