[Co-Creative Digital Platforms for Mental Healthcare].

In the German healthcare system, the treatment of patients with mental disorders is taking on an increasingly important role. The number of people with mental illnesses in Germany has been rising significantly, and not just since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is accompanied by both economic and personal challenges. In this article, we contribute to the digital transformation in the healthcare sector by providing a conceptual analysis of the referral problem in mental health. To this end, we show that digital platforms offer a wide set of opportunities to structure the currently opaque supply side of the market and make both offline and online care and support services more accessible to patients and their relatives in a straightforward way, thus meaningfully enhancing the patient journey. Our results illustrate the necessity of considering the characteristics and of the platform and the implementation by means of co-creative techniques. In summary, our study presents a comprehensive and contextualized conceptualization of a referral platform and provides relevant evidence for the design and development of future platforms for both the academic discourse in the field of health IT and stakeholders from the field.