Real-Time Assessment of the Burden on the Community of Informal Caregivers. A Pilot Study
- PDF / 558,149 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 41 Downloads / 175 Views
Open Access
Real-Time Assessment of the Burden on the Community of Informal Caregivers. A Pilot Study Anna Pettini 1,2 Received: 11 February 2020 / Accepted: 5 October 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Good mental health is a critical part of individual well-being, and one of the cornerstones of community well-being. This paper focuses on the community of parents of young psychiatric patients, whose well-being loss is significant because of the enormous burden of suffering that results from their children’s illness. This burden is seldom considered by the ordinary calculations of the costs of mental illness. We suggest that digital daily diaries (DDDs) with instant reporting can become a powerful tool to estimate the intangible costs of mental illness, namely the loss of well-being suffered by the community of informal caregivers. A pilot study was carried out to test the validity of the digital tool. The results of instant reports provide accurate information and are consistent with those obtained through other traditional survey methods. The digital data-gathering tool can be extended to design an affordable, prompt, and cost-effective possible solution for policy-oriented interventions. Besides, this digital tool can easily be extended to collect real-time big data and to use them in conjunction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to give professionals a powerful tool to face a relevant community issue. Keywords Community well-being . Intangible costs . Mental health . Informal caregivers .
Artificial intelligence . Instant daily report . Digital health JEL Classification I31 . I10 . O33 . H51
* Anna Pettini [email protected]
1
Department of Economics and Management, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
2
DataLifeLab, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
International Journal of Community Well-Being
Introduction In February 2020, the FDA officially launched a new digital health program, encouraging the development of mobile medical apps (MMA) to provide citizens and health care professionals with valuable health information (FDA 2020). This paper suggests that digital health tools can be useful to measure the intangible burden of disease that mental illness causes on the community of families of psychiatric patients and, to this purpose, we test the validity of a digital monitoring app. Good mental health is a critical part of individual well-being, the foundation for happy, fulfilled, productive lives, and one of the cornerstones of community well-being (Musikanski et al. 2020). However, about 380 million people worldwide have severe mental disorders (Ritchie and Roser 2020; Vigo et al. 2016; Whiteford et al. 2013; WHO 2019), and related costs are huge. The Lancet alerts that mental ill-health might cost the global economy up to 16 trillion dollars by 2030 (Patel et al. 2018). The OECD calculated that the cost of mental illness in the EU exceeded 4% of GDP in 2015 (OECD/European Union 2018), and some research estimated that mental illness accounts for one-third of all costs of noncommunicab
Data Loading...
