The Effects of Real Time Client Feedback Using a Mobile App.

Strong therapeutic relationships built on trust are essential to effective mental and behavioral health services. Regularly eliciting feedback from clients can help develop these relationships, and using tools specifically designed to aid in eliciting client feedback are particularly beneficial to the client/provider therapeutic alliance. With the growing trend of technology-based health care delivery, adopting technology-based health care delivery modalities such as mobile applications (apps) have the potential to increase the accessibility and real-time capacity of client feedback tools. A randomized control trial was used to investigate the effectiveness of a client feedback mobile app in fostering therapeutic relationships of youth in care at a large, multi-state behavioral healthcare organization. Compared to the control group (n = 124), individuals in the intervention group (n = 119) experienced faster development of a strong working alliance with their service provider. These findings have relevant implications to the landscape of child welfare services, in which services are often abbreviated due to systems mandates or brief by design. Highlights: A brief working alliance tool helps create a strong working alliance between youth and provider quicker than not using a working alliance tool. Working alliance tools may have the most impact at the start of the therapeutic relationship by facilitating relationship development. Working alliance tools may be particularly useful in services that are time-limited by decreasing the time required to form a healthy youth-provider relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]