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BearingOn.Health Original Contribution
October 2023
by Anne Llewellyn, MS, BHSA, RN, CRRN, CMGT-BC, BCPA, FCM
The disruptive potential of digital health was in full play at the 2023 Population Health Colloquium that took place September 18-20, 2023 in Philadelphia. I go to this conference each year to learn about advances happening in the industry. In addition to the esteemed faculty who discuss challenges and solutions, there is an exhibit hall with forward thinking professionals whose companies are helping to change how care is delivered. Here are a few examples: Fox Rehabilitation is a Philadelphia based rehabilitation company who has recently added Remote Therapeutic Monitoring, through a Partnership with OneStep, to provide comprehensive value-based care for older adults. Another company I have seen grow over the years is b.well. b.well, is a technology company that offers a connected health platform that empowers consumers to become advocates through access to and understanding of their holistic health data. The result is putting consumers in the center of the healthcare equation. To learn more about other forward-thinking companies disrupting the industry, visit the Population Health Colloquium Website https://populationhealthcolloquium.com.
One of the sessions provided an example of a disruptor. Kintsugi helps providers and members of the healthcare team fill gaps in the area of Mental/Behavioral Health. The session was titled: Surfacing the Unspoken: Empowering Healthcare Organizations to Close the Gaps in Mental Healthcare. Kintsugi is a company that was founded by two ambitious women who shared a common challenge in accessing quality mental health services through their healthcare providers.
I caught up with presenter Josh Pappas, Sr. Director of Sales for Kintsugi. I asked Josh a few questions about Kintsugi ,the technology that powers the product and how it works to help mental health payers and providers recognize depression.
BearingOn.Health: What is the problem you’re working to solve?
Josh: While the mental health crisis continues to grow in the U.S. (29% of U.S. adults reported struggling with depression in 2023, +52% vs. 8 years ago) the ways in which we identify mental health conditions in clinical settings hasn’t changed in decades. Existing standards of care have not solved for the $200B cost of undiagnosed depression.
Today, the most prevalent method for screening for mental health conditions remains paper-based forms, like the PHQ-2, PHQ-9, or GAD-7. Cumbersome, time consuming and reliant on patients self-reporting their symptoms, these forms involve clinicians and nurses spending too much of the patient’s visit asking uncomfortable questions. As a result, mental health screenings occur in only 4% of primary care interactions.
Poor quality in mental health diagnosis leads to downstream cost effects, including prolonged treatment, ineffective interventions, and increased healthcare utilization. Our analysis shows that direct medical costs for people with unrecognized depression are over $10,000 per year, 38% higher than those with self-reported depression.
BearingOn.Health: How is Kintsugi technology closing gaps in mental health care?
Josh: Kintsugi harnesses the power of AI and voice to identify signs and severity of mental health conditions in less than a minute. Our API first software seamlessly embeds into existing clinical workflows, integrates with the EMR, provides real-time mental wellness scores by severity and connects those in need to the right level of care. This allows patients and their clinicians to track behavioral health over time.
BearingOn.Health: What outcomes have you seen for those using the product?
Josh: One of the country’s largest payors partnered to use Kintsugi Voice to conduct mental health screenings on its recently discharged ED patients and patients in Maternal Health. Although they were screening these populations with a PHQ-2, they were worried that patients might still be slipping through cracks. We worked together to screen their members using Kintsugi Voice. Our tool not only successfully identified 30% more members with some level of depression compared to PHQ-2, it also produced scores according to depression severity.
Clinical validation remains a vital part of our work. We recently finished a cross-sectional clinical trial with Vituity. We tested the feasibility of using Kintsugi’s machine learning models to detect signs of depression from free form speech in telehealth settings. Our models were able to correctly detect signs of severe depression in 91% of the patients screened. See full study here, along with additional clinical trials on the Kintsugi Research page.
Look for more examples of technologies that are disrupting the status quo and how they are improving the delivery of care in future issues of BearingOn.Health. If you have questions or would like to suggest a technology you have found to make a difference in your practice, contact Anne Llewellyn at allewellyn48@gmail.com
References:
1. Fox Rehabilitation https://www.foxrehab.org/press/fox-rehabilitation-partners-with-onestep-rtm
2. b.well: https://www.icanbwell.com
3. Kintsugi Health: Kintsugihealth.com
4. Will Disruptive Innovations Cure Health Care? https://hbr.org/2000/09/will-disruptive-innovations-cure-health-care
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