Constructing mental health interventions comes with specific methodological challenges, especially when working with vulnerable communities. Developing means of assessment for such projects compounds these challenges because the need to protect participant information may conflict with the need to produce persuasive results about the intervention to obtain funding for additional care. This article seeks to redress these methodological challenges by proposing new protocols for approving and assessing mental health interventions centered within multiply marginalized communities.

This article examined the usability claims that Electronic Health Records (EHRs) make to healthcare providers. Usability claims appear as statements that persuade users to adopt the interface based on usability or user experience. These claims may show what healthcare providers are presumed to require from online health technologies. Usability claims in this study included intuitive interfaces, adaptability of documentation and records, and supplementing patient communication. Analyzing usability claims then becomes a way of understanding healthcare providers, their patients, and the technologies both use for health communication

This study explored the introduction of an ecological care model into a women’s alcohol-and-other-drug treatment facility. When patients learned that their health resembled a network of factors including demographics, health experiences, and their own health literacy, they approached addiction as a problem that required complex solutions. The authors present a methodology derived from rhetoric of health and medicine scholarship and the medical humanities that may help patients improve mental health literacy and treatment outcomes.