Scaling Up Psychological Interventions Into the Daily Lives of Patients

While the demand for psychological treatments is high, only a small percentage of those in need receive treatment, indicating the current dominant mode of treatment delivery, individual therapy, is unlikely to meet the needs for psychological care. Beyond accessibility challenges, many individuals do not benefit from treatments related to factors such as delays in intervention delivery after an occurred challenge, and a detachment of the therapy setting from daily life where challenges occur. Treatments are further typically delivered in controlled therapy settings for one hour per week during an average of 112 waking hours, making it challenging for some patients to transfer learned skills to real-world contexts where they are most needed. This highlights the need for alternative approaches to deliver psychological interventions. While limitations in resources have traditionally constrained clinicians in treatment delivery, recent technological advances offer opportunities to extend psychological interventions beyond the therapy room in flexible and cost-effective ways. Ecological Momentary Interventions (EMIs) represent one type of scalable digital intervention that can be adopted to increase the frequency, reach, and extend the delivery context of psychological interventions. This article outlines how EMIs can be used to provide (a) personalized, (b) just-in-time-interventions (c) across diverse contexts to extend the reach of psychological treatments, and (d) increase the frequency of interventions for those in need of a greater number of interventions. It further highlights (e) how EMIs can function as standalone or complement existing treatments to (f) increase access and scalability of effective psychological interventions by freeing up resources, or (g) provide novel intervention possibilities, such as integration within stepped-care frameworks or as follow-up interventions to retain treatment effects after successful treatment. Additional opportunities and challenges are outlined toward the goal of improving the effectiveness and increasing the accessibility of psychological treatments.