Development of Virtual Mental Health Stepped Care Service for a Heart Failure Remote Management Program: Qualitative Descriptive Study.

Background: Depression is highly prevalent yet undertreated among people living with heart failure, indicating barriers to mental health services. Although various digital mental health interventions have been developed to detect, treat, and manage depression in this population, these interventions have seen limited integration into clinical care and a lack of implementation research. Stepped care is a service innovation that may promote the implementation of these technologies into clinical settings, but few studies have examined how these services are designed in clinical settings. Objective: This study aimed to identify strategies to address health system barriers to accessing mental health care from the perspective of people living with heart failure, clinicians, and researchers, and to incorporate these strategies into the design of a virtual mental health stepped care service within a heart failure remote management program. Methods: A qualitative description study was conducted using purposive recruitment of people living with heart failure, clinicians, and researchers from a heart failure remote patient management program. As part of a service design approach, semistructured interviews explored potential strategies to address barriers to accessing mental health services. Two researchers coded the data descriptively and constructed themes to guide the development of a virtual stepped care service. Results: A total of 22 participants were interviewed, comprising 13 people living with heart failure and 9 clinicians and researchers. Six themes were identified, comprising 4 requirements and 2 foundational principles. The requirements were to (1) adopt a collective approach to identify distress across methods, people, and time points; (2) maintain a referral-based approach; (3) rely on existing mental health human resources; and (4) offer patient choice among various mental health care options. These requirements were supported by two principles: (1) building on organizational strengths and (2) reducing treatment burden. Based on these findings, a virtual stepped care service was developed, incorporating a depression screening module, referral-based workflows, and, where clinically appropriate, patient choice in treatment selection. Conclusions: The stakeholder-informed design of this virtual stepped care service contributes to the limited literature on stepped care service design and demonstrates how such models can be tailored to their intended contexts. Although each component was designed to address health system barriers to mental health care for people living with heart failure, resource limitations may constrain the balance between feasibility and quality of care. Future research should evaluate the acceptability of this model among people living with heart failure and clinicians.