Comparing approaches to DOORS with CAMH's Digital Innovation Hub

This month, our lab members Katherine Lim and Mason Granof traveled to Toronto to visit our partners at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Digital Innovation Hub, led by Dr. Gillian Strudwick and research manager Iman Kassam. The trip offered a valuable opportunity to exchange ideas and compare approaches around the future of digital mental health. 

A central focus of the visit was a knowledge exchange around the Digital Outreach for Obtaining Resources and Skills (DOORS) program, a digital literacy curriculum originally developed by our lab. The Digital Innovation Hub team has been piloting an adapted version of DOORS within the Collaborative Learning College at CAMH. At its core, the Hub team kept the same foundational lessons and modules, preserving the structure and learning objectives of the original curriculum. Their team reorganized the content into two distinct tracks (one covering foundational digital skills and the other focused on practical life skills) allowing facilitators to tailor the experience depending on a learner's starting point. Most notably, their team is developing an interactive app to help users practice foundational digital skills, such as basic gestures like tapping, swiping, and scrolling, as well as typing and scam identification through guided examples and decision-making walkthroughs. 

Additionally, both our team and the Hub team (although working independently) have begun developing lessons on basic AI literacy as an extension of the DOORS program. This connection speaks to a broader shift in the digital mental health and literacy field. As AI digital tools become more embedded in everyday technology, helping people understand what AI is, how it works at a basic level, and how to interact with it is becoming just as important as teaching someone to use their email or navigate a web browser. 

Our team members also hosted a roundtable with discussion featuring presentations on our Digital Clinic program, digital literacy, and emerging approaches to AI education. These conversations brought together perspectives from both teams and highlighted the similarities that exist between our teams’ work, even when our settings differ. 

A final component of the visit involved interviews with CAMH's digital navigators, who are members of a clinical team who work directly with clients to build digital skills and support technology use in daily life. These conversations gave us a view of how the navigator role is operationalized at CAMH, including the varying responsibilities, the barriers navigators face in implementation, the systems that allow the work to succeed, and broader considerations around feasibility and sustainability.

We left Toronto with new ideas, a deeper appreciation for the amazing work being done by Dr. Strudwick, Iman, and their colleagues, and a clearer sense of where our shared efforts are heading. We look forward to continuing this partnership and to finding new ways to ensure that digital mental health programming reaches the people and communities who need it most.