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Professor Nick Titov is committed to developing and delivering high quality psychological treatments. Nick is Co-Director of the eCentreClinic, a research unit that develops and evaluates digital mental health services. Nick has co-developed more than 15 online psychological interventions. These have been evaluated in more than 80 clinical trials of internet-delivered treatments involving more than 9,000 people across four countries. He has published more than 175 peer reviewed articles and has received more than $65M in project and research funding. 

Nick is also Executive Director of MindSpot, at MQ Health, Macquarie University. MindSpot operates two digital mental health clinics, the MindSpot Clinic and PORTS which serve 25,000 Australians per year. Nick also provides advice and support for organisations developing and delivering digital mental health services in Australia as well as in other countries.

A large number of research trials have demonstrated that psychological interventions can be effectively delivered via the internet. An increasing number of Digital Mental Health Services (DMHS) are now successfully delivering such interventions in routine care to large numbers of consumers. This talk extends this evidence base by describing key lessons learned when delivering DMHS in Australia and Canada at the MindSpot and Online Therapy Clinics, respectively.

The lessons include learnings at four levels of analysis: Lessons about working with 1) consumers, working with 2) therapists, 3) operating DMHS, and 4) working within healthcare systems. In hindsight, some of the lessons are obvious, but none were apparent when we first launched our DMHS. Some of these lessons are specific to DMHS, but many are relevant to traditional mental health services.

Key themes include that many consumers are seeking information, assessment and advice, and not just treatment services, that successful delivery of DMHS require commercial expertise in management, IT, finance and related business processes, skills which are considerably different to those required for conducting clinical trials. Other themes include the complexity of navigating health systems, the need to effectively work with funders and decision makers, the importance of robust systems for training and supervising therapists, and the importance of avoiding hype.

We conclude that the benefits of such services for the broader community significantly outweigh the challenges of developing and delivering DMHS. However, we stress that DMHS are not a panacea, but should be complementary components within contemporary national mental health systems.