Reaching individuals with information designed to help with anxiety and depression can be difficult, especially when they’re in rural areas. Consistent, fast internet is still not available in many of these areas, so text-messaging outreach is highly preferred (about 95% of US residents have a cell phone with text capabilities).
That’s exactly the type of program Assistant Professor Douglas Knutson, PhD and his researchers in the Counseling and Counseling Psychology Program at Oklahoma State University (OSU) began piloting last year. The program provides transgender and nonbinary individuals with an affirmative cognitive-behavioral intervention for anxiety and depression. Creating interventions that can be delivered electronically, but still contain a human touch and are responsive to client needs is challenging, according to Dr. Knutson.
The first iteration of his program used Google Voice for text messaging and was highly manual, involving multiple Excel spreadsheets to track participants and their progress within the program (referred to as a “protocol” by researchers). The system was far from ideal. Fielding text messages from multiple individuals simultaneously on days the program was open to participants was stressful. Automating messages for participants or potential enrollees to receive after hours was awkward at best. Program management was also difficult, with pertinent information scattered across multiple data sources.
The final straw came when Google Voice began setting limits on how many text messages program researchers could send in a row without a response before being labeled us spam. (The program involves sending multiple informative texts back-to-back at times.) Dr. Knutson began looking for other solutions, finding a few but only one that had all of the features he sought. “I found the folks at Rhinogram to be incredibly responsive and engaging,” says Knutson. “I was further hooked by the fact that the product has a really engaging interface that met our needs all in one place, instead of having to cobble together all those spreadsheets and platforms.”
