Human-centered Perspectives on a Clinical Decision Support System for Intensive Outpatient Veteran PTSD Care
Abstract
Psychotherapy delivery relies on a negotiation between patient self-reports and clinical intuition. Growing evidence for technological support of psychotherapy suggests opportunities to aid the mediation of this tension. To explore this prospect, we designed a prototype of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) for treating veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder in a Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy intensive outpatient program. We conducted a two-phase interview study to collect perspectives from practicing PE clinicians and former PE patients who are United States veterans. Our analysis distills opportunities for a CDSS (e.g., offering homework review at a glance, aiding patient conceptualization) and larger challenges related to context and deployment (e.g., navigating Veterans Affairs). By reframing our findings through three human-centered perspectives (distributed cognition, situated learning, infrastructural inversion), we highlight the complexities of designing a CDSS for psychotherapists in this context and offer theory-aligned design considerations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.03467,
title = {Human-centered Perspectives on a Clinical Decision Support System for Intensive Outpatient Veteran PTSD Care},
author = {Cynthia M. Baseman and Myeonghan Ryu and Nathaniel Swinger and Kefan Xu and Andrew M. Sherrill and Rosa I. Arriaga},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.03467},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
17 pages, 1 figure. The first two authors contributed equally to this research. Accepted to appear in the Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026)