Next: Technology to enable patient-centered, collaborative behavioral health and chronic care management

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Tech Is Dri­ving Col­lab­o­ra­tion In Behav­ioral Health (TechCrunch):

“Col­lab­o­ra­tion amongst providers is crit­i­cal in all aspects of med­i­cine, but nowhere is this more true than in behav­ioral health (men­tal health and sub­stance use dis­or­ders), where the costs of poor col­lab­o­ra­tion are sky-high…There is a moun­tain of evi­dence to sug­gest that a bidi­rec­tion­al rela­tion­ship exists between many behav­ioral and phys­i­cal health con­di­tions — med­ical dis­or­ders often lead to men­tal dis­or­ders, and men­tal health con­di­tions may place some­one at risk for med­ical disorders…

Anoth­er advance­ment in behav­ioral health­care tech­nol­o­gy is the tools — smart­phone apps, wear­able devices and online sup­port com­mu­ni­ties — a patient can use for self-man­ag­ing behav­ioral health and chron­ic phys­i­cal health con­di­tions. Cog­ni­tive Behav­ioral Ther­a­py (CBT) is one such treat­ment tra­di­tion­al­ly admin­is­tered in face-to-face ther­a­py ses­sions that has been suc­cess­ful­ly com­put­er­ized in recent years by com­pa­nies like myStrength…

Some com­pa­nies have even fig­ured out how to use the smart­phone as a sen­sor to bet­ter detect behav­ior changes that can tell us a lot about one’s men­tal state. Ginger.io gath­ers infor­ma­tion on move­ment, tex­ting and call pat­terns — col­lect­ed in the back­ground on a patient’s phone — and has been able to rec­og­nize when cer­tain behav­iors might indi­cate risk of devel­op­ing men­tal health disorders…

With core sys­tems in place and incen­tives steadi­ly chang­ing, tech­nol­o­gy can be a potent cat­a­lyst to reor­ga­niz­ing how we work for patients. The time for col­lab­o­ra­tive behav­ioral health and chron­ic care man­age­ment is now. The liveli­hood of our patients, and our orga­ni­za­tions, lit­er­al­ly depends on it.”

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