William Smith
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Young people treated for a first episode of psychosis often do well in Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC), a short-term, team-based treatment program. However, those gains tend to fade after they leave the program.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
first-episode psychosis
Coordinated Specialty Care
behavioral economics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Identify facilitators and barriers to using behavioral economic and financial incentive strategies for patients leaving Coordinated Specialty Care for first-episode psychosis, guided by a stakeholder steering committee.
- Adapt and repeatedly refine incentive-based strategies, using text messaging and the mindLAMP mobile health app to monitor and reinforce treatment engagement, medication adherence and substance avoidance.
- Run a pilot randomized controlled trial to test the preliminary effectiveness, feasibility, acceptability, recruitment and retention of the adapted post-CSC intervention.
More about the research
Keeping patients engaged in treatment, taking their medication and avoiding substances after discharge could help preserve that progress. Behavioral economics, which uses insights about how people actually make decisions, and financial incentives have improved adherence in other conditions. They have not been tested in this transition period, where patients often fall out of contact and where incentives raise ethical concerns.
Why it matters
People recovering from first-episode psychosis could keep the benefits of specialized early treatment if engagement, medication adherence and substance avoidance are maintained after discharge. Ethically designed incentive strategies delivered through texting and mobile apps could offer clinicians a practical tool for this hard transition.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Maunank Shah
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Evaluate the accuracy and consistency of HIV clinical cases and responses generated by PRISM-HIV, a large language model tool that simulates a faculty mentor for case-based learning.
Danielle Jake-Schoffman
University of Florida, FL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Refine the FamilyCollab smartwatch app, which supports parent-child goal setting, shared real-time exercise and reflection, through two rounds of usability studies with 12 parent-child pairs.
Sasha Gorrell
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Psychology
Engage youth, caregivers and clinician stakeholders during a preparatory phase to adapt a single-session consultation protocol for families waiting for specialty eating disorder treatment.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.