AI in Mental Healthcare

The Penn Collaborative’s research focuses on pragmatic and sustainable strategies to increase access to high-quality mental health care - particularly in low-resource contexts. A fundamental challenge in this work is one of scaling.  Over the past decade, the Penn Collaborative team has collaborated with community partners, industry leaders and tech startups, and other implementation science researchers to explore the role technology can play in scaling up access to high-quality mental health care. Dr. Creed’s work with industry partners (Lyssn.io) emphasizes the development, evaluation, and implementation of artificial intelligence-based tools to allow therapists to learn and practice new skills, to evaluate the use of those skills in their regular therapy sessions, and to facilitate targeted and efficient supervision. In collaboration with Dr. Emily Becker Haimes, we are also working to use behavioral economics principles to improve the delivery of cognitive behavioral therapy in a telehealth context. Dr. Patty Kuo is leading a career development award (K23) to create a natural language processing-based therapist tool to improve culturally responsive mental healthcare. To that end, we have been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health for several technology focused grants including:

• Technology-Supported Training And Quality Assurance For Psychosocial Interventions (NIMH R56, Creed PI)
• Enhancing the quality of CBT in community mental health through AI-generated fidelity feedback (NIMH STTR, Creed & Atkins, MPI)
• Leveraging telepsychology and behavioral economics to increase fidelity to CBT (NIMH R34, Becker-Haimes & Creed, MPI)
• Development of a natural language processing (NLP) based therapist tool for culturally responsive care (NIMH K23, Kuo, PI)
• Partner Perspectives and Adaptation of a Behavioral Coding System: Initial Steps Towards the Development of an Automated Cultural Competency Feedback Tool (NIMHHD LRP, Kuo, PI)