HCDE impact: Improving mental healthcare for all Americans with UW’s ALACRITY Center

The University of Washington’s ALACRITY Center, housed within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and co-directed by Human Centered Design & Engineering Professor Sean Munson, is exploring new ways to make high-quality mental healthcare more available to all Americans. Supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the Center brings together experts from many fields to design and test new strategies for delivering mental health care.

The ALACRITY Center is a strong example of interdisciplinary collaboration at UW. Its team includes researchers from medicine, engineering, information, public health, and social work. By working together, they are able to take on complex mental health challenges from multiple perspectives, developing creative solutions that can be used in real-world settings like primary care clinics, schools, and community programs.

Big picture: enhancing access to effective mental healthcare

Access to mental healthcare remains a challenge for many people, particularly in communities with limited resources. Research shows that many individuals seeking care prefer psychosocial interventions—therapeutic approaches that emphasize psychological and social factors—to alternatives like medication. These interventions not only help individuals develop skills to manage immediate mental health concerns but also reduce the risk of future recurrence. However, they are often unavailable in places where most Americans commonly seek help, such as primary care clinics, schools, and other community health spaces.

With support from the NIMH, Munson and the ALACRITY team are redesigning psychosocial interventions to be more user-friendly, effective, and engaging. These improvements will expand access to care across different settings, giving more people more options in their mental health treatment.

Community impact: making treatments with proven results available to more Americans

To date, ALACRITY-supported projects have helped identify and address design issues in more than 15 mental health treatments, along with their training and support materials. ALACRITY researchers have also found 12 common design problems in psychosocial mental health treatments, providing insights to help future designers anticipate and prevent similar issues. Additionally, the team is developing resources to support design teams across clinics, health systems, and school systems in adapting treatment designs to better meet patient needs.

Among the ALACRITY-supported efforts, several projects led by HCDE researchers bring user-centered design to the forefront of mental health innovation.

One recent HCDE-led project supported by ALACRITY resulted in a new digital health intervention for adolescents with depression. The tool helps teens plan and engage in mood-boosting activities while improving communication with their therapist. The initial project was led by HCDE Professor Julie Kientz and Jessica Jenness, a clinical child psychologist at Seattle Children's Hospital and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Munson mentored the team and later led the follow-up study in collaboration with HCDE Research Scientist Elin Bjorling, whose research focuses on stress in teenagers. With follow-up funding through NIMH, the team is refining the tool for a larger study at a children’s hospital.

Another HCDE-led project, funded with a pilot grant from the ALACRITY Center and by a separate grant from the National Cancer Institute, resulted in SCOPE, a platform for technology-enhanced collaborative care that integrates a patient-facing mobile app with a provider-facing registry. This project was developed by a team that included HCDE Associate Professor Gary Hsieh and has shown, through user studies, improved patient-provider engagement and better collaboration within the patient's care team.

An ongoing project, co-led by Munson, aims to expand access to Problem Solving Treatment (PST), a brief, evidence-based approach that helps individuals address day-to-day problems contributing to their depression that builds confidence in their ability to manage challenges. While PST has shown strong results, many providers struggle with implementation, even after significant training. To support both patients and providers, the UW team developed a web-based tool that guides them through the steps of PST noth week-to-week and between sessions. The design of this tool was informed by another ALACRITY Center project led by HCDE PhD alumna Elena Agapie, which analyzed where PST and similar therapies often break down and how design could better support their use. A pilot study of the tool showed promising results in terms of usability, appropriateness, and improvements in depression outcomes. The team is now moving into a larger, nationwide clinical trial.

The importance of federal research investment

Through NIMH support, the US leads the way in developing psychosocial interventions, yet these innovations remain unavailable to many Americans. Since its founding in 2018, the ALACRITY Center has worked to close this gap by redesigning treatments to fit in commonly used healthcare settings, ensuring a greater return on federal research investments.

Unlike pharmaceutical treatments, which often receive strong industry backing, psychosocial interventions lack significant financial incentives for private companies. As a result, federally funded research is critical to making these treatments widely available to those who need them most.

“Two of our studies are about to begin trials that we hope will bring meaningful improvements to mental healthcare, and continued funding is critical for that,” said Munson. “We're also preparing our next two pilot projects—though we don’t yet know their exact focus, past projects have aimed to improve care for older adults, children, veterans, and expectant and new mothers. Our team is ready to learn from these studies, asking what can we do to make psychosocial mental health interventions more widely available and what design challenges still need to be solved."

By identifying common design issues in existing interventions and creating resources to help treatment designers adapt their approaches, the ALACRITY Center is working toward a future where high-quality treatments are accessible to all Americans—wherever they seek care.