“Mental health apps offer a head start on recovery” – Irish Times, 18/01/18

Here is a piece by Sylvia Thompson on a recent First Fortnight panel discussion I took part in on apps in mental health.

Dr Séamus Mac Suibhne, psychiatrist and member of the Health Service Executive research technology team says that while the task of vetting all apps for their clinical usefulness is virtually impossible, it would be helpful if the Cochrane Collaboration [a global independent network of researchers] had a specific e-health element so it could partner with internet companies to give a meaningful rubber stamp to specific mental health apps.

“There is potential for the use of mental health apps to engage people with diagnosed conditions – particularly younger patients who might stop going to their outpatients appointments,” says Dr Mac Suibhne. However, he cautions their use as a replacement to therapy. “A lot of apps claim to use a psychotherapeutic approach but psychotherapy is about a human encounter and an app can’t replace that,” he says.

Here are some other posts from this blog on these issues:

Here is a post on mental health apps and the military.

Here is a general piece on evidence, clinical credibilty and mental health apps.

Here is my rather sceptical take on a Financial Times piece on smartphones and healthcare.

Here is a piece on the dangers (and dynamics) of hype in health care tech

Here is a post on a paper on the quality of smartphone apps for panic disorder.

Once again, it isn’t about the tech

From MobiHealthNews:

West Virginia hospital system sees readmission reductions from patient education initiative

A telehealth initiative at Charleston Area Medical Center led to reduced readmission rates for several chronic conditions, the health system reported today.

What led to the reductions wasn’t the advent of video consultations with specialists or sophisticated biometric sensor monitoring, but health information for patients and workflow integration for hospital staff via SmarTigr, TeleHealth Services’s interactive patient education and engagement platform that offers videos designed to educate patients about their care and medication

Technology is an enabler of improved patient self-management and improved clinician performance – not an end in itself.

More on the health education elements of this project:

As only 12 percent of US adults have the proficient health literacy required to self-manage their health, the four-hospital West Virginia system launched the initiative in 2015 to see what they could do to improve that statistic. With SmarTigr, they developed condition-specific curriculums – which are available in multiple languages – and then “prescribed” the videos, which are integrated into smart TVs, hospital software platforms and mobile applications. Patients then complete quizzes, and the hospital staff review reports of patient compliance and comprehension, and all measurements become part of the patient’s medical record.

“Self-management” can be a godterm, shutting down debate, but the sad reality that health literacy (and, I would argue, overall literacy) is such in the general population that it will remain a chimera.

Finally, this project involved frontline clinicians via a mechanism I hadn’t heard of before – the “nurse navigator”

Lilly developed a standard educational approach by working with registered nurse Beverly Thornton, CAMC’s Health Education and Research Institute education director, as well as two “nurse navigators,” who work directly with the front-line nurses. They developed disease-specific video prescriptions for CHF and COPD that give a detailed list of educational content videos patients are to watch before they are discharged, followed by quizzes.

“actual clinic services with real doctors”

Again, from MobiHealthNews:

A new kind of doctor’s office opened in San Francisco this week: Forward, a membership-based healthcare startup founded by former Googler Adrian Aoun that infuses a brick-and-mortar office with data-driven technology and artificial intelligence.

For $149 per month, Forward members can come to the flagship office that features six examination rooms – equipped with interactive personalized displays – and doctors from some of the Bay Area’s top medical systems. Members are given wearable sensors that work with Forward’s proprietary AI for proactive monitoring that can alert members and their doctors of any abnormalities as well as capture, store and analyze data to develop personalized treatment plans. Members also have 24-7 mobile access to their data, rounding out what Aoun believes is a new type of preventative care.

What is interesting about this piece is that there are various other start-ups whose vision is not based on telemedicine or on “empowering consumers”, but on what is at its core the traditional surgery office except with much slicker tech. It is also interesting that Forward’s approach is based on a personal experience:

The impetus for Forward came from a personal experience of Aoun’s. When one of his close relatives had a heart attack, he found himself sitting in the ICU and realizing healthcare wasn’t quite what he thought it was. Seeing doctors having to obtain health records from multiple sources and wait days or weeks for test results and suffering from all-around communication breakdowns within their health system, he was inspired to create an alternative model – one focused on prevention, efficiency and connected tools to create a increasingly smart healthcare plans based on each individual’s needs and goals.

I took the title of this post from what I found a rather amusing aside in a later paragraph:

It also isn’t the first company to offer a hybrid of physical and digital services. In September 2016, startup Carbon Health opened its first clinic, also in San Francisco, that offers actual clinic services with real doctors

“actual clinic services with real doctors”! – sounds truly revolutionary – and quite a difference from the techno-utopian slant of the Financial Times piece I blogged about earlier in the week. At times readers may detect a certain weariness with the hype that surrounds digital health, the overuse of “revolutionary” and “transformative” and so on, the goes-without-saying presumption that healthcare is bloated and inefficient while tech is gleaming and slick and frictionless.  This is far from saying that healthcare doesn’t need change, and can’t learn from other fields – I look forward to hearing more about Forward.