A California-based company is giving mental health clinicians a means of managing patients between office visits – and charging for those interventions.
SelfEcho's Mobile Therapy platform gathers information through short, custom-designed smartphone questionnaires answered by the patient throughout the day. If the answers to those questions trigger any alerts that had been previously set by the provider, a caregiver can contact the patient.
The platform designed by Santa Barbara-based SelfEcho is typical of a new wave of provider-facing tools, whereby the provider sets the parameters of the interaction and can manage and bill accordingly. It's especially helpful to behavioral health and other specialists who base their care on office visits, but who would want to keep track of their patients in between those visits as long as they can control the interactions.
"It's all about sharing more information with your clinician, while having the clinician set the limits," says Jacques Habra, SelfEcho's CEO, who notes the platform can be designed to collect hundreds of 'psychological metrics' for treatment of such issues as depression, anxiety, stress, relationship management and PTSD. "You want to let the clinician decide how to process that data."
[See also: Can telehealth displace the therapist's couch?]
Mobile Therapy's algorithms are based on research conducted by Professor James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin, and their appeal to mental health practitioners is based on a national survey conducted by SelfEcho, which found that 66 percent of providers believe that collecting data on patients through mobile devices would improve treatment. In addition, some 68 percent of clinicians surveyed said integrating data from apps for mental health tracking into therapy practices would help them advance their profession.
Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and research director for Mobile Therapy, says the platform gives mental health practitioners the ability to develop a concierge medicine service. While "giving amazing peace of mind to the patient even if they don't use it," he said, Mobile Therapy enables providers to customize and monetize treatment plans.
"Clinicians can typically only charge for when they're in a session," says Habra, "but so much of what happens with a patient … happens outside that session." A concierge-style platform, he says, allows providers to set a fee for reviewing patient data between each office session, as well as charging for interventions if needed.
It also gives them a more rounded view of the patient.
“Mobile Therapy addresses one of the most significant pain points in mental healthcare, which is that clinicians are usually limited to understanding clients’ issues based only on what’s discussed during appointments,” adds Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and senior scientific advisor for SelfEcho, in a press release. “Mobile Therapy gives clinicians new psychology tools to not only better understand what is going on in their clients’ lives, but also to intervene when needed in order to improve treatment and outcomes.”
Habra and Schooler want to see the Mobile Therapy platform expanded to collect data from wearables. "It's challenging to find good psychological measurements that can be reliably stressed," says Schooler.
"There are a lot of opportunities to incorporate new data that would help" the provider, adds Habra, who says wearable monitors may one day be used to collect physiological data that can pinpoint stressful episodes.
"It's so cutting-edge to do this," Habra says. "The entire mobile therapy platform is disruptive in a positive way."
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