FOCUS mHealth Intervention for Veterans With Serious Mental Illness in an Outpatient Department of Veterans Affairs Setting: Feasibility, Acceptability, and Usability Study

Benjamin Buck · Janelle Nguyen · Shelan A. Porter · Dror Ben‐Zeev · Greg M. Reger

13 citations0/0 files storedJMIR Mental Health

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Digital Mental Health Interventions Mobile Health and mHealth Applications Mental Health Research Topics

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Veterans with serious mental illnesses (SMIs) face barriers to accessing in-person evidence-based interventions that improve illness management. Mobile health (mHealth) has been demonstrated to be feasible, acceptable, effective, and engaging among individuals with SMIs in community mental health settings. mHealth for SMIs has not been tested within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). OBJECTIVE: This study examines the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effectiveness of an mHealth intervention for SMI in the context of VA outpatient care. METHODS: A total of 17 veterans with SMIs were enrolled in a 1-month pilot trial of FOCUS, a smartphone-based self-management intervention for SMI. At baseline and posttest, they completed measures examining symptoms and functional recovery. The participants provided qualitative feedback related to the usability and acceptability of the intervention. RESULTS: Veterans completed on an average of 85.0 (SD 96.1) interactions with FOCUS over the 1-month intervention period. They reported high satisfaction, usability, and acceptability, with nearly all participants (16/17, 94%) reporting that they would recommend the intervention to a fellow veteran. Clinicians consistently reported finding mHealth-related updates useful for informing their care. Qualitative feedback indicated that veterans thought mHealth complemented their existing VA services well and described potential opportunities to adapt FOCUS to specific subpopulations (eg, combat veterans) as well as specific delivery modalities (eg, groups). In the 1-month period, the participants experienced small improvements in self-assessed recovery, auditory hallucinations, and quality of life. CONCLUSIONS: The FOCUS mHealth intervention is feasible, acceptable, and usable among veterans. Future work should develop and examine VA-specific implementation approaches of FOCUS for this population.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

References

2001Validation of the Insomnia Severity Index as an outcome measure for insomnia research 2016Theme development in qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis 1993Quality of Life Enjoyment and Satisfaction Questionnaire: a new measure.2014Feasibility, Acceptability, and Preliminary Efficacy of a Smartphone Intervention for Schizophrenia 2015Prevalence, Comorbidity, and Prognosis of Mental Health Among US Veterans 2014PTSD Treatment for Soldiers After Combat Deployment: Low Utilization of Mental Health Care and Reasons for Dropout 2017A randomized controlled trial of a smartphone app for posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms.1993Quality of Life Enjoyment and Satisfaction Questionnaire

Cited by

2024Wearable neurofeedback acceptance model for students’ stress and anxiety management in academic settings 2024Leveraging Personal Technologies in the Treatment of Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: Scoping Review 2023Wearable Neurofeedback Acceptance Model: An Investigation within Academic Settings to Explore a Multimodal Framework for Student Stress and Anxiety Management 2025Digital Health Interventions for Military Members, Veterans, and Public Safety Personnel: Scoping Review

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.