Recently Funded Projects: Engaging Hard-to-Reach Individuals

Engaging Hard-to-Reach Individuals with Serious Mental Illness through Use of a Mobile, Computerized, Consumer-Provider Communication Tool

Funder: Staunton Farm Foundation

Summary: The UPMC Center for High-Value Health Care and Community Care Behavioral Health (Community Care) are non-profit entities committed to inform and advance health care policy and practice through innovative service delivery that supports value-driven health care. To this end, Community Care has recently invested in CommonGround — a promising practice that utilizes technology to help behavioral health consumers express their recovery goals, concerns, and preferences prior to psychiatric visits, enabling them to participate more substantively in conversations with their clinicians about treatment.

CommonGround is currently being used in several clinic-based settings across the Community Care network. This project seeks to expand the use of CommonGround through web-based mobile technology to reach high-risk consumers with serious mental illness (SMI) in Allegheny County who are not served in clinic-based settings and therefore do not have access to this effective consumer-provider communication tool.

Working with consumers and practitioners of Community Treatment Teams (CTT) at Mercy Behavioral Health, Community Care staff will develop an effective and sustainable training and support process for using CommonGround via mobile technology that is useful and acceptable for hard-to-reach populations. In addition, through access and use of CommonGround in a CTT population, we will enhance consumer activation in care, improve consumer-provider communication, and support consumer engagement in recovery-oriented, community-based services.