The DigiPshych Revolution

March 21, 2016 by InTouch Health

The term “telepsychiatry” makes you think of those days when a movie star filming in New York would call a Beverly Hills shrink for a long-distance session.

Today, a land-line telephone is seldom used in remote mental health, so perhaps we should start using the expression “DigiPsychiatric” treatment. That term encompasses not just the traditional provider/patient session, but the enormous amount of data that can be collected (both actively and passively) to aid in diagnoses.

Here are some of the pressing problems that DigiPsych is helping to address:

• Mental health is the third costliest health condition in America
• Nearly 60 million Americans have a behavioral health condition, far more than can be treated in conventional brick-and-mortar locations
• Patients who have a behavioral condition in tandem with a chronic disease cost the U.S. healthcare system 75 percent more than those with physical illnesses alone

There’s a lot of innovative work being done at the crossroads of telehealth and mobile mental health apps. For instance, Centerstone Research in Nashville gave smartphones and the Ginger.io app to patients in a recent pilot. The app was used to gather both active (patient-provided) and passive data gathered on sleep patterns, activity levels and communication trends (e.g., a patient who normally sends 20 texts per day is now sending none). The Centerstone program reduced the participants’ ER days by 23 percent and hospital days by 51 percent.

And we’re just beginning to tap the full potential of wearables like FitBit. In a recent study, a specially designed wearable was able to remotely detect patients’ use of opioids and cocaine in real-time.

In the past, a behavioral care provider had to guess whether a patient was abusing drugs or not sticking to treatment protocol. Now it’s possible to gather meaningful data 24/7 to eliminate the guesswork and greatly improve the quality of care. The DigiPsych revolution has just begun.