The emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll on everyone and has greatly intensified the need for accessible mental healthcare. The UW ALACRITY Center was given a grant by the US National Institute for Mental Health to study the acceptability, usability, and effectiveness of mental health apps for suicide prevention among essential workers and…
Access to mental health care by essential workers and the unemployed during the COVID19 pandemic has been challenging. Usual access to mental health care is limited by social distancing, and for many now unemployed due to closures of businesses, insurance is insufficient to cover the costs of mental health care. The aim of this project…
Julie A. Kientz is a Professor and Chair of the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. She directs the Computing for Healthy Living and Learning Lab, is active in the Design, Use, Build (dub) alliance, and has adjunct appointments in The Information School and Computer Science & Engineering. Dr.…
The ALACRITY Center is taking on a new project in response to COVID-19, “Stay Connected: developing an intervention to promote mental health among isolated senior housing residents”. Leading the project are Patrick Raue, PhD, Patricia Areán, PhD, and Brenna Renn, PhD. We will work with senior housing residents experiencing social distancing challenges to design a remote program…
Amritha Bhat, MBBS, MD, MPH, a psychiatrist trained in both India and the United States, is currently an assistant professor in the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She earned her Master of Public Health through the UW School of Public Health. She established the perinatal psychiatry clinic at the University of Washington Medical Center and has…
Stephanie is a postdoctoral research fellow in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Her focus is in developing school-based interventions. Her unique approach to developing interventions is to target barriers related to ease of implementation, contextual relevance, and cultural responsiveness. Currently Dr. Brewer is working to explore how Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) can be adapted to fit in a school setting. She and her team are conducting interviews with…
We ended 2019 with 2 newly funded pilots making a total of 12 incubator research pilots representing 12 disciplines. The newly approved projects will add professional expertise in communication, health services, and gastroenterology.
Daniel Stillman of The Conversation Factory led UW ALACRITY Center members and the larger Seattle #DesignThinking community in a workshop created to challenge your assumptions of how workshops should be run and hone skills to improve the quality of conversations. Participants ran through several exercises to practice Daniel’s approach to facilitation and had a lot…
Gary and Amy, recipients of an R03, have been leading research around depression care in rural and urban cancer centers- applying a human-centered design process to discover contextual constraints and gather requirements for the design and development of a digital platform to support the delivery of Collaborative Care Management (CoCM) for depression. Their work will be part of a…
Prior to the 5th Biennial Society for Implementation Research Conference (SIRC), UWAC sponsored a one day workshop to discuss the intersection of Implementation Science and Human/User Centered Design. Attendees from both fields came together to hear presentations by Sarah Birken, Madhu Reddy, and Alex Dopp and participate in activities to identify opportunities to integrate implementation science and HCD in order to…