PracticePal project funded by The Agency fund USA is a key to rapidly improving access to mental health care in Low- and middle-income Countries (LMICs) is to enhance the effectiveness and scalability of non-specialist-led brief psychological interventions such as Sangath’s Healthy Activity Program (HAP), the most utilized psychological treatment of its kind for depression.
Sangath with technical partner Dimagi, will develop a digital tool – PracticePal which will help clients practice work they are assigned in HAP sessions by counsellors. PracticePal will build on the existing HAP client-facing workbook through Dimagi’s experience with conversational agents. This conversational agent (chatbot) will provide education resources and help in reminding clients to complete assigned activities via Telegram. This funding would support the development and pilot of PracticePal, in Hindi, with clients in Madhya Pradesh and Goa, India. This will improve outcomes through more frequent and thorough practice, and impact the quality of counselling sessions as well.
This Pilot will be summarized in preparation for a subsequent two-arm RCT with larger sample and accompanying cost-effectiveness study.
Practice Pal Team
Professor Vikram Patel
Senior Advisor
Dr Abhijit Nadkarni
Project Supervisor
Dr Ravindra Agarwal
Principal Investigator
Amruta Suryavanshi
Research Coordinator
Kimberley Monteiro
Intervention Coordinator
Shreya Sharma
Research Assistant