What is it about?
Many Veterans with substance use disorders experience problems with attention, memory, and organization that can make it harder to engage in treatment, especially when care is delivered through telehealth. Before launching a new telehealth cognitive rehabilitation program, we partnered with a Veteran Engagement Group to learn directly from Veterans about what would make the program easier to understand, access, and use. Their feedback led to practical improvements in recruitment materials, telehealth workflows, and intervention delivery, such as simplifying language, reducing cognitive burden, and making virtual sessions easier to follow. This paper describes how involving Veterans early in the research design process helped create a more accessible and user-friendly intervention that better reflects their needs and experiences.
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Why is it important?
Healthcare interventions are often designed without substantial input from the people they are intended to serve. This paper demonstrates that engaging Veterans early in the design process can produce practical changes that improve accessibility, participation, and the overall experience of telehealth care. Although our work focused on a cognitive rehabilitation program for Veterans with substance use disorders, the design principles we identified, such as reducing cognitive burden, using recovery-oriented language, and simplifying telehealth procedures, may help researchers and clinicians develop more effective, patient-centered behavioral health programs across many healthcare settings.
Perspectives
This project grew out of a simple question: how can we design telehealth interventions that are truly accessible for Veterans experiencing cognitive difficulties during recovery from substance use disorders? Working with a Veteran Engagement Group reinforced that meaningful research starts by listening to the people it's intended to serve. I hope this paper encourages researchers to partner with stakeholders early to create interventions that are both practical and accessible.
Kate Shirley
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Veteran-informed design considerations for telehealth cognitive rehabilitation in substance use disorder care., Psychological Services, July 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/ser0001067.
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