Roundtable: Advancing Best Practices in e-Mental Health in Canada

This resource was published in 2017. The data may be out of date.

Key Findings

The following emerged from the roundtable as clear principles for future action on e-Mental health:

• Investing in e-Mental health is essential as it represents a way of addressing some of the Canadian health care system’s biggest issues, including long waits to see mental health practitioners.
• Clinicians must be onboard as designers, champions and users of e-Mental health solutions.
• A new funding model is needed to support e-Mental health. Current models are not set up to pay clinicians to offer remote treatment for patients at home and postdischarge support.
• The technology is out there. The challenge is determining which solutions work and then scaling them across the health care system.
• Scalability is key. Planning must include a roadmap for taking a project from the pilot stage to full-blown implementation.
• Sustainability is hard, but essential. Getting started with e-Mental health innovations is often easier than sustaining them over the long term, yet that sustainability is vital to their success.
• Privacy and security concerns must be addressed for system-wide e-Mental health to be viable.
• Standards and best practices must be developed so solutions can be assessed, practices chosen and outcomes measured.
• We need to think about vulnerable populations. People living in poverty, for instance, may not be reachable by e-Mental health.
• Everyone needs to be involved to resolve barriers to e-Mental health — clinicians, not-for-profit organizations, medical schools, regulatory bodies, and federal and provincial/territorial governments all need to be engaged to push forward e-Mental health strategies.