TED Community » April Foreman

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I'm passionate about

Borderline Personality Disorder; Rural Mental Health; Healthcare and Social Media; Technology innovations in Mental Health

An idea worth spreading

I use SMS based mood monitoring tool with patients. I am finding that it improves awareness of mood, and that patients are more engaged with better clinical outcomes when they use this tool. What is truly amazing is that tools like this are free, save time, and are working with patients who are the most severe and chaotic in rural community mental health.

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  Apr 26 2011: I am a psychologist. Back in January I began using an SMS based mood monitoring tool with my patients/clients. This has been an amazing experience that transformed my clinical practice. Patients text a 1-10 mood rating, and an optional short message about their mood, which uploads to a web account that they give me consent to view. I can know how these patients are doing on a daily basis, quickly review functioning if they leave me a message indicating distress, and check it at the beginning of my clinical interactions to get a quick read on how they are doing. Patients overwhelmingly like this tool, have strong engagement with it, and over 90% maintain that engagement with the tool over time. It has improved my diagnostic insight, given my patients the sense that I am engaged with them between sessions, and allowed them to review their patterns of mood over time in insightful ways. Many patients have shown strong improvements after years of poor mood regulation. This has been especially useful with my patients that have Borderline Personality Disorder. It has been free, save me time, improved treatment compliance/adherence, contributed to my alliance with patients, and has been, above all, *cool*. If this is what can be done with a web service and a lower tech flip phone, imagine what can happen in the future as my poorest clients have access to even better technology...PS: I work at a rural community mental health center. If we can do this in rural Kansas, imagine the generalizability of these benefits.