Designing User-Centered Interfaces to Support Clinical Decision-Making and Patient Engagement

The delivery of most psychotherapies has been constrained by data collected from patient self-report and clinician intuition for the last century. Clinicians who use evidence-based treatments need methods, tools, and data to efficiently track, assess, and respond to mental health needs throughout the treatment process. Patients need tools that provide feedback to optimize their therapeutic exercises and increase engagement. In this dissertation, I explore how interfaces shared by clinicians and patients can be used to support this aim in the context of prolonged exposure (PE) therapy, an evidence-based treatment used in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I focus on the case of designing for United States (US) veterans as well as the clinicians who treat them as US Veterans are disproportionately affected by PTSD due to the nature of their work. In this dissertation, I investigate how to design shared, user-centered interfaces which seek to support clinical decision-making and patient engagement in the context of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To lay the groundwork for design, I detail the care ecologies of veterans with PTSD, identifying the human and non-human intermediaries involved in their circles of care as well as barriers to care and future design opportunities. Leveraging this information, I explore how a clinician dashboard for PTSD, sensor-captured patient generated data, and feedback gathered via text message from trusted others (e.g., friends, family) can be designed into a shared interface and support clinical decision-making and/or patient engagement.Ph.D