CVS Health: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) apps may help you more than sleeping pills
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Sleep Therapy for the Masses May Be Coming to You Soon (The New York Times):
“CVS Health wants to help millions of American workers improve their sleep. So for the first time, the big pharmacy benefits manager is offering a purely digital therapy as a possible employee benefit.
The company is encouraging employers to cover the costs for their workers to use Sleepio, an Sleepio app featuring a cartoon therapist that delivers behavior modification lessons.
CVS Health’s push could help mainstream the nascent business of digital therapeutics, which markets apps to help treat conditions like schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis. The company recently introduced, along with Sleepio, a way for employers to cover downloads as easily as they do prescription drugs. The company said it had already evaluated about a dozen apps…
Big Health, the start-up behind Sleepio, is one of more than a dozen companies that are digitizing well-established health treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, or devising new therapies — like video-game-based treatments for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — that can be delivered online. Since last year, a few pharmaceutical companies, including Novartis, announced partnerships with start-ups to develop digital treatments for mental health and other conditions.”
News in Context:
- Pear Therapeutics raises $50M to develop and market a portfolio of digital therapeutics for mental health
- FDA clears first CBT-based digital therapeutic to treat substance abuse disorders
- The FDA creates new Digital Health unit to reimagine regulatory paths in the age of scalable, AI-enhanced innovation
- Five reasons the future of brain enhancement is digital, pervasive and (hopefully) bright