Using Digital Media Advertising to Reduce the Duration of Untreated Psychosis - Project Summary
Approximately 100,000 individuals in the Unites States experience a first episode of psychosis (FEP) each year.
Psychotic symptoms typically emerge during formative years of adolescence and young adult development and
interfere with the establishment of healthy educational, vocational, and social foundations. Despite the severity
of symptoms and significant decline in functioning, the time between symptom onset and receiving appropriate
care in the U.S. is alarmingly lengthy. Longer DUP has been shown to independently predict negative outcomes,
including poorer response to treatment, worse global, vocational, social, and cognitive functioning, greater risk
of relapse, higher symptom severity, and poorer quality of life. Prior successful DUP reduction initiatives have
utilized various marketing strategies to educate the community about early intervention services, however these
strategies are expensive, inefficient, and outdated. Targeted online outreach, supported by technological
innovation, offers the prospect of proactively reaching individuals earlier in the course of illness development, as
well as individuals who might not otherwise come into contact with traditional referral sources. In response to
this challenge, Northwell Health's early psychosis research team is collaborating with Strong365, a nonprofit
initiative dedicated to raising early psychosis intervention awareness, to develop and test a proactive and
targeted comprehensive digital media marketing campaign designed to facilitate help-seeking and encourage
treatment initiation in prospective patients with FEP and their caregivers. Our team will take advantage of search
engine advertisements, which allow advertisers (researchers) to select keywords/phrases and create linked ads
appearing as a strategically placed search result. Our dedicated ads will appear in response to online search
queries conducted by prospective patients and their caregivers throughout New York State (NYS) that align with
the campaign's pre-selected keywords/phrases. Individuals who click on the ads will be immediately directed to
our landing page/website, and offered a variety of innovative and interactive online engagement tools intended
to instantly connect users with specialty care staff and to facilitate earlier treatment initiation. Campaign referrals
will be centralized and individuals with FEP will be enrolled into OnTrackNY (OTNY), a network of 21 dedicated
early psychosis intervention programs throughout NYS. The campaign will target individuals as well as their
caregivers, searching for psychosis-related terms or information online. We will measure the DUP of individuals
enrolled into OTNY before and after campaign activation and track the impact of the campaign on the number of
FEP referrals and number of patients admitted to OTNY in NYS. Furthermore, we aim to identify the campaign
target audience most effective at promoting treatment initiation as well as the online tools and resources most
effective at encouraging treatment initiation for individuals with FEP. We will additionally explore the online
trajectories to care of individuals with FEP engaging with the campaign.
