The rapid advancement of digital health and care technologies has created new opportunities for addressing children’s mental health, particularly within primary and social care sectors. Digital tools offer innovative ways to monitor, assess, and support children’s well-being, bridging gaps in care and ensuring timely interventions.
However, these advancements also bring critical considerations for clinical safety, especially when dealing with vulnerable populations like children. In this blog, we will explore how digital health and care is utilised in children’s mental health care and its implications for clinical safety.
The Rise of Digital Health and Care in Children's Mental Health
Digital health and care covers a range of technologies, including mobile health apps, telemedicine platforms, wearable devices, and digital therapeutics. These tools have been integrated into mental health care due to their accessibility, scalability, and ability to provide personalised support. For children, who are often comfortable with technology, these tools can be particularly effective.
- Mobile Health Apps: Apps supporting mental health offer features like mood tracking, relaxation techniques, CBT exercises, and resources for children and parents, allowing children to engage with mental health care outside traditional clinical settings.
- Telemedicine: Telemedicine platforms improve access to care, particularly in underserved areas. Through video consultations, children can receive psychological assessments, therapy, and follow-up care, ensuring continuity and reducing stigma.
- Wearable Devices: Devices that monitor physiological indicators such as heart rate and sleep patterns offer valuable insights, helping detect potential mental health issues and prompting early intervention.
- Digital Therapeutics: Evidence-based interventions delivered digitally help treat or manage mental health disorders, offering structured programs with real-time feedback and progress tracking.
Clinical Safety Considerations in Digital Health and Care
While digital health and care offers promising solutions, ensuring clinical safety is paramount. The following elements are essential to maintaining the efficacy and safety of these interventions:
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Intended Use of the Product: It’s essential that the digital health and care solution is designed and marketed for the specific mental health needs it addresses. This means understanding how the product fits within the existing clinical care pathways, and ensuring it is used as intended for children’s mental health support.
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Ownership and Accountability: Clear agreements and contracts must outline the ownership and responsibility for the digital solution, including who is accountable for ensuring that it is safely deployed and managed. This involves determining who has access to the data and ensuring it reaches the appropriate caregiver when needed.
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Evidence-Based Solutions: Digital health and care tools must be tested to prove their effectiveness. Regulatory bodies should oversee these tools to maintain safety standards and evidence be collated to support safety claims.
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Ethical AI and Algorithms: AI-based tools should be transparent, unbiased, and continuously updated to reflect the latest clinical guidelines, ensuring safe and personalised care.
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Safeguarding and Clinical Governance: Ensuring the safeguarding of children is crucial when deploying digital health and care tools. Regular hazard workshops, risk assessments, and on–going monitoring must be conducted to identify and mitigate any potential risks to children’s safety. This includes understanding how data is collected, stored, and shared, ensuring it reaches the right caregiver at the right time. These considerations should be part of the clinical governance framework, helping track and monitor any emerging issues related to clinical safety.
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Integration with Traditional Care: Digital tools should complement, not replace, traditional mental health care. For instance, data from wearable devices or mobile apps should be shared with healthcare providers to ensure holistic care and consistency.
Other considerations include:
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Age-Appropriate Content: Interventions should be tailored to children’s developmental stages, ensuring the content is suitable and avoids any misinformation that could harm their well-being.
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Parental Involvement: For younger users, parental involvement is crucial. Parents should have access to monitoring tools, ensuring a collaborative approach to care.
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Data Privacy and Security: Protecting children’s sensitive health data from breaches is critical. Platforms must comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, implementing strong security protocols.
Ensuring Governance and Clinical Safety
As digital health and care tools continue to rapidly evolve, it is vital they are governed by clinical and patient safety standards, such as those outlined in the Health and Social Care Act 2012, DCB0129, and DCB0160. These frameworks ensure digital solutions adhere to rigorous governance protocols, safeguarding both clinical safety and patient risk management.
Increasingly, digital solutions are being deployed without proper governance or clinical safety oversight, even within local authorities and social care services. This lack of clinical governance poses significant risks, including the delivery of ineffective or unsafe interventions that fail to protect vulnerable populations like children.
It is crucial that digital health and care solutions undergo thorough clinical validation, adhering to safety standards, testing for efficacy, and addressing potential risks. Health and care providers must be properly trained to use these tools effectively, ensuring they enhance care and mitigate risks.
Challenges and Considerations
While digital health and care holds great promise, it is not without challenges. Privacy concerns, the digital divide, and the need for evidence-based interventions must be addressed. Ensuring digital tools are secure, accessible, and effective is essential to protecting children’s mental health and clinical safety.
Digital health and care solutions should be integrated into existing frameworks that complement traditional care. Proper training for health and care providers is necessary to maximise their benefits.
Conclusion
These solutions are transforming how we approach children’s mental health in primary and social care. By enabling early detection, improving access to care, personalising treatment, and enhancing co–ordination, digital tools are improving outcomes for children with mental health needs. As these technologies continue to evolve, they will play an increasingly important role in safeguarding the mental well-being of future generations.
For more information on Digital Health and Compliance, visit https://digi-safe.uk.
Further Reading:
This article discusses four digital technology options which can help children and young people with mild to moderate symptoms of anxiety or low mood and have been recommended for use in the NHS. However, this is not a definitive list and there are other considerations to take into account which are not covered in this blog.