In partnership with Sutter Health, a leading healthcare provider with over three million patients across Northern California, Code and Theory designed, developed and launched a powerful mental health app called Scout by Sutter Health™. The platform was designed to help teens and young adults manage their everyday mental health and build resiliency. It is available for free, nationally, in the App Store.

Scout officially launched on Tuesday, October 10th, on World Mental Health Day, to shine a light on the need to create impact-driven tools that support mental health.

The Scout platform promotes self-reflection, expression, and education. Scout’s free toolkit includes daily feelings tracking and trend evaluation, personalized educational tools, frequent mental health check-ins and clinically approved support resources. After completing a wellness check-in, users are guided through positivity and mindfulness exercises and gain badges through Scout’s reward system. Resources are readily available for immediate support.

“With access to mental health care facing so many challenges, we need to lean on the collective power of the creativity and commitment of those who are addressing youth mental health from many angles,” said Vandana Pant, senior director of Sutter Health’s Design and Innovation team. “Leveraging the accessibility and scalability of a digital platform, 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.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health has been identified as a public health emergency. The U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, has stated his commitment to making youth mental health a priority while acknowledging the complexities today’s youth face.

Stephen Clements, Chief Creative Officer at Code and Theory, shared: “Scout meets young people where they engage most and blurs the lines between the clinical and non-clinical. Many young people get health advice from TikTok so we were thrilled to reimagine clinical content with Sutter Health to create an engaging, personalized, education and wellness tool to promote mental health. We hope Scout becomes a trusted tool for many on World Mental Health Day and beyond.”

Scout by Sutter Health™ creators, who include young people, caregivers and clinical specialists, are the first to say the platform is deliberately not counseling or therapy. Rather the app is a resource for young people to gain early understanding of difficult emotions and mental health stressors. It helps strengthen users’ abilities to manage daily life challenges. And if needed, it redirects teens and young adults to clinical care through available anxiety and depression screenings.

Code and Theory’s interdisciplinary team worked with Sutter Health for more than six months to design, develop and launch Scout. The Scout digital platform is built as a progressive web app, which is faster, more cost-effective, and allows more access to more people across the socio-economic spectrum, rather than being exclusively built for web or mobile, or iOS and Android.

In addition to designing all user interface and user experience elements for Scout, Code and Theory also created over 300 original illustrations.

In its pilot phase, Scout made favorable impressions on users. Users evidenced a 40% increase in resiliency and 93% found the content meaningful, rating it four out of five stars overall. Scout by Sutter Health™ has also earned recognition from Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation by Design award and their 2021 World-Changing Ideas.

Get in touch to learn more about Scout, or to discuss your next project.