Health Technology/clinical-trials

Pilot Trial Targets the Inpatient-to-Outpatient Gap: Digital Smoking Cessation Intervention for Persons With Serious Mental Illness — Key Findings for Clinicians

247 Health News Editorial

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3 Aug 2026

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4 min read

·clinical-trials

A completed US pilot trial has tested a tailored digital smoking cessation intervention — BecomeAnEX — introduced during inpatient psychiatric admissions to bridge the critical gap between hospital-enforced abstinence and community care. With smoking rates two to four times higher in people with serious mental illness and near-universal post-discharge relapse, the findings carry significant implications for how psychiatric inpatient services approach tobacco treatment.

Originally reported by ClinicalTrials.gov

References

  1. 1.University of Maryland, Baltimore. (2020). Pilot testing a digital intervention to improve smoking cessation in persons with serious mental illness (NCT04367506). ClinicalTrials.gov. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04367506
  2. 2.Tidey, J. W., & Miller, M. E. (2015). Smoking cessation and reduction in people with chronic mental illness. BMJ, 351, h4065. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h4065
  3. 3.Dickerson, F., Schroeder, J., Katsafanas, E., Khushalani, S., Origoni, A. E., Savage, C., Schweinfurth, L., Stallings, C., Sweeney, K., & Yolken, R. (2018). Cigarette smoking by patients with serious mental illness, 1999–2016: An increasing disparity. Psychiatric Services, 69(2), 147–153. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201700118
  4. 4.Prochaska, J. J., Gill, P., & Hall, S. M. (2004). Treatment of tobacco use in an inpatient psychiatric setting. Psychiatric Services, 55(11), 1265–1270. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.55.11.1265
  5. 5.Whittaker, R., McRobbie, H., Bullen, C., Rodgers, A., Gu, Y., & Dobson, R. (2019). Mobile phone text messaging and app-based interventions for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 10, CD006611. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006611.pub5
  6. 6.Walker, E. R., McGee, R. E., & Druss, B. G. (2015). Mortality in mental disorders and global disease burden implications: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry, 72(4), 334–341. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.2502
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