On 13 May 2025, IMPROVA hosted The fourth session of the Mental Health Dialogues webinar series, entitled “From Research to Real-World Implementation: Challenges and Lessons learned in eHealth for Mental Well-being” in collaboration with six sister projects—ADVANCE, SMILE, MentBest, Reconnected, Bootstrap, and ASP-Belong. This edition tackled one of the most pressing issues in mental health innovation: how to move from promising research to effective, real-world application.
Moderated by Rocío García-Carrión (Ikerbasque Professor at Deusto University), the session created a dynamic and collaborative space for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and users to share experiences and challenges in implementing digital solutions for mental well-being.
The event opened with a keynote speech by Sara Brazys from the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA), who highlighted the critical importance of bridging the policy-research gap.
The webinar began with a round of lightning talks from representatives of each project, who shared key lessons about engaging users in the design and delivery of eHealth tools. This was followed by a moderated panel discussion exploring barriers to bridging the gap between research and real-world implementation, technical and social challenges to adoption, the importance of co-creation, policy support, and digital inclusion. Finally, panelists answered live questions from the audience, who asked about implementation in low-resource settings, strategies to mitigate risks of mobile phone addiction, among other topics.
🔗 Pre-register for future webinars here: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/JointWebinar2024