At a session sponsored by Amwell at the Payer Issues Roundtable hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review, John Jesser, president of clinical solutions for Amwell, and Derek Richards, chief science officer at SilverCloud Health — a part of Amwell that provides digital mental health services— discussed the increased need for a virtual and digital behavioral health experience. They also explained how Amwell’s digital and virtual mental health program expands member access to behavioral health and helps more people from across the acuity spectrum with evidence-based techniques.
Four key takeaways were:
1. Mental health care service were already hard to get before the pandemic and now demand is even greater. One in five adults in America experience mental health issues during their lifetime, yet access to mental health care is limited as 60 percent of U.S. counties do not have a single psychiatrist. The pandemic only exacerbated mental health issues, Mr. Jesser said. He cited CDC statistics indicating that the prevalence of depression and anxiety surpassed 40 percent of the population during COVID compared to only about 20 percent pre-COVID.
2. Innovative solutions are needed to meet the high demand for mental health care. “There aren’t enough therapists in the world to meet the tsunami of need,” Mr. Jesser said. “The old way we treated people was one on one, human to human. And we aren’t going to be able to do that. Yet, we don’t want to impersonalize and make care robotic. So how do we solve it?”
Amwell had already been offering virtual therapy, with great success, but wanted to also provide solutions for lower-acuity members in hopes of preventing a mental health condition from snowballing. That’s where digital mental health programs come in.
3. Amwell’s approach expands access to care and helps capture “top-of-funnel,” or lower-acuity, members. Amwell’s digital mental health solution is not just “evidence informed,” Mr. Richards said. It is evidence based and clinically validated.
Amwell’s digital mental health tools complements Amwell’s virtual therapy with self-guided and coached cognitive behavioral health programs for people with mild to moderate symptoms. “We screen everyone at the beginning, and we stratify individuals appropriately based on whether they are high or low acuity,” Mr. Richards said. Each person’s path to better behavioral health is different based on whether an initial evaluation determines that their condition is severe, moderate or mild. “We can monitor them during their treatment and can escalate them at any point into a higher intensity, whether that be virtual tele-psychology or tele-psychiatry.” Members can also be deescalated if deemed appropriate.
4. The solution gets results while helping more people at a reduced cost. Amwell reports that 65 percent of its digital mental health programs users experience clinically significant improvement. At the same time, costs are reduced by 75 percent or more and 10 times the number of members can be treated with the same resources. “At the end of the day, the throughput for the same amount of providers is dramatically increased,” Mr. Jesser said. “And outcomes are dramatically improved. That’s what we’re all trying to do.”
The demand for mental health care is unrelenting, but that field faces the same staffing pressures as the rest of healthcare. Digital solutions can help fill the gap while also helping low-acuity members learn more about maintaining their wellness and steering high-acuity members to the additional care they need.
