ePortfolio - Scholarly Project

MindFlo: Cycle-Informed Mental Health Symptom Tracking

A DNP Scholarly Project | The University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing

The Problem

Women with psychiatric conditions frequently experience predictable symptom worsening tied to menstrual cycle phases, particularly during the luteal and perimenstrual periods. Research shows that between 40 and 66 percent of women with mood, anxiety, and attention disorders report clinically meaningful premenstrual symptom exacerbation. Despite this, menstrual cycle data are rarely collected or integrated into routine psychiatric care. The result is missed patterns, misinterpreted symptom instability, and suboptimal treatment adjustments.

The Project

MindFlo is a quality improvement initiative focused on the design and pilot testing of a digital symptom-tracking prototype for use in outpatient psychiatric settings. The application integrates daily menstrual cycle phase data with structured mental health symptom monitoring, giving patients and clinicians a shared, longitudinal view of symptom patterns over time.

The project is grounded in a systematic review of 15 studies examining luteal phase symptom worsening across psychiatric diagnoses, submitted for publication to the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association. That evidence base informed the design of MindFlo's core tracking instrument, which captures mood, anxiety, sleep, and cognitive symptoms using validated, patient-friendly items.

Project Aims

By the end of the pilot period in fall 2026, this project aims for at least 80% of participating users to demonstrate improved recognition of their symptom-cycle patterns, and at least 75% of clinicians to report that MindFlo adds meaningful clinical value to assessment and treatment planning.

"The MindFlo logic model illustrates the relationships between project inputs, activities, outputs, and expected outcomes across short-, medium-, and long-term timeframes."

Conceptual Framework

This project is guided by the Nonadoption, Abandonment, Scale-up, Spread, and Sustainability (NASSS) framework, which evaluates the factors that influence whether a health technology is successfully adopted and sustained in clinical practice. The NASSS framework shapes how MindFlo was designed, how implementation will be evaluated, and how barriers to adoption will be identified and addressed.

Why It Matters

Cycle-informed psychiatric care is an emerging and underutilized approach with strong biological and clinical rationale. When clinicians can see how a patient's symptoms track with their cycle, they are better positioned to distinguish chronic instability from predictable, hormonally mediated fluctuations, adjust interventions with greater precision, and engage patients as active partners in understanding their own mental health. MindFlo is designed to make that kind of care practical, accessible, and scalable.