Researcher and developer of SykTek® Well
Associate Professor Rachel Heath is an academic in psychology and a digital health researcher whose work sits at the intersection of clinical practice, technology design, and mental health outcomes.
Associate Professor Rachel Heath
Academic and researcher in Psychology
Background
Research rigour applied to real problems
Associate Professor Rachel Heath is an academic researcher with over five decades of experience in psychological research and mathematical modelling. Her work focuses on the design, evaluation, and implementation of digital tools that extend the reach of evidence-based care of people with chronic medical conditions.
Her research programme develops mathematical tools to enable digital health interventions that can produce clinically meaningful outcomes — with a particular emphasis on the integration of digital tools into existing clinical workflows. Rachel has served as a consultant to a project involving Telepsychiatry in the Hunter New England region of NSW, Australia, a Workplace Wellness company in Sydney, Australia, and with the Biaffect bipolar patient monitoring project in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. The latter project employed the monitoring of keyboard activity on mobile phones.
SykTek® Well emerged directly from this research: a platform designed not to replace clinical care, but to support it — providing people with structured, evidence-based tools while generating longitudinal data that informs clinical and personal wellness decision-making.
Credentials & affiliations
Qualifications and professional standing
Doctor of Philosophy (Psychology)
McMaster University, Canada, 1976
Bachelor of Science (Honours, First Class and University Medal)
University of Newcastle, Australia, 1970
Current Position: Honorary Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Newcastle, Australia
Areas of scholarly inquiry
Digital mental health intervention design
Examining the design principles, content frameworks, and delivery mechanisms that distinguish clinically effective digital mental health tools from those that fail to produce meaningful outcomes.
Patient engagement and adherence
Investigating the individual, clinical, and technological factors that predict sustained engagement with digital health interventions, and the relationship between engagement patterns and clinical outcomes.
Clinical integration of digital tools
Developing frameworks for the thoughtful integration of digital health technologies into existing clinical workflows — addressing questions of therapeutic alliance, clinician training, and patient safety.
Psychometric validation
Validating digital adaptations of established clinical assessment instruments and developing new measures suited to the longitudinal, ecological momentary assessment context of mobile health platforms.
Interested in collaborating or learning more?
Associate Professor Heath welcomes enquiries from clinicians, researchers, health services, and developers interested in evidence-based digital mental health.