Meet Scout: A Powerful Tool by Sutter Health, Building Resilience in Today's Youth
Rates of anxiety and depression among young people have reached record highs in recent years, with U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calling it “the defining public health crisis of our time."
To help combat this health emergency, Sutter Health, a California not-for-profit healthcare system, partnered with Code and Theory to build, design and launch Scout: a mental health and resilience app that makes care and intervention more accessible for teens and young adults.
Impact
- 93% Of users identify Scout content as "meaningful”
- 80+ Custom-built learning and interactive tools
- 2024 Webby Winner in Apps & Software - Health, Wellness & Fitness
Key Takeaways
- Built a first-of-its-kind app made for and by youth and their caregivers
- Developed as a progressive web app to ensure maximum accessibility across the socio-economic spectrum
- Launched on World Mental Health Day to highlight impact-driven tools that support mental health
A resource for right now
Sutter Health's 3 million+ patients include thousands of young adults — many of whom face everyday stressors and threats to their emotional well-being.
We built Scout as the first digital toolkit providing practical resilience strategies and 24/7 support for youth on their mental health journey. Scout uniquely combines non-clinical screenings, personalized content, and engaging tools for self-expression.
Built on trust
Building trust with users is important for any product, but for one dealing in mental health, it’s critical. We partnered with a youth advisory board throughout the app development process. By collaborating with members of our key demographic, we identified knowledge gaps and gained critical insight into our audience's day-to-day realities.
We also built Scout with a novel learning management system (LMS) that abstracts personal identifiable information (PII) to fully protect users’ identity and ensure a safe and secure experience.
Tailored to each user
Scout is different from coaching or therapy and more than a digital mood tracker: it’s a resilience-based resource for youth and their loved ones, offering an adaptable learning program tailored to their needs and interests.
As users share their feelings, Scout provides resources to support them in the moment, meeting them where they are. Scout’s learning program introduces users to coping strategies and response tactics to handle difficult and unfamiliar emotions, while providing a safe space to vent, reflect, and build new perspectives.
Tools for self-expression
Finding ways to express yourself is a crucial part of making sense of your feelings. Scout provides users with engaging, easy-to-use tools for self-expression that include a daily journal to write, record and/or draw how they feel, as well as an emotional trend dashboard to help identify patterns in their mood.
Building every day 'rugged' resilience
Scout’s curriculum was developed using the Rugged Resilience Measure — a clinician-validated, 10-item measure of psychological resilience.
Scout provides tools and practical strategies by identifying qualities associated with successful adaptation to atypical stress. Periodic check-ins help users track their progress over time.
Crafting an inviting visual language
If you could capture the act of youthful self-expression, what would it look like? This was the prompt Scout’s design team shared with us when we set out to develop the product’s visual language.
We designed a system involving more than 300 original illustrations that celebrated the human hand-drawn sketch. The system aimed to create a cohesive language that would elevate the experience while inviting users to contribute to it through their own visual expression.
Accessible at its core
Creating an accessible experience — in terms of user experience and inclusivity – was foundational to Scout’s development.
The product meets WCAG standards with an accessibility score of AA and is available in English and Spanish. Scout was also built as a progressive web app to enable faster development, greater cost-efficiency, and more equal access to the experience for users across the socio-economic spectrum.
The Scout toolkit serves as one small example of how proactive, 24/7 youth mental health support may aid young people before circumstances hit crisis levels.
Built for impact
Scout officially launched on World Mental Health Awareness Day to shine a light on the need to create impact-driven tools that support mental health.
With access to mental healthcare facing such an array of challenges, Scout leverages the collective power of clinical resources, engaging design and accessible technology to directly support youth, and their caregivers, everywhere.
