Data Collection Capabilities Give Providers Insights into Clinician Performance, Patient Treatment

Tracking behavioral health outcomes and therapist performance has been notoriously challenging in the past.

New telehealth capabilities could be the key to measurement-based care in the future, according to panelists at The Future of Mental Health event. Digital tools could also provide more insights into clinician performance and help behavioral health organizations provide appropriate interventions.

“Psychiatry has a lot of very good, very well validated tools that are associated with outcomes,” Dr. Seth D. Feuerstein, faculty at Yale School of Medicine and serial entrepreneur, said. “We just don’t use them.”

Advertisement

ieso, a U.K.-based digital mental health company, records patients’ PHQ-9 and Gad-7 scores as behavioral health measurements. The startup then uses these metrics as a tool to track patient outcomes and give therapists feedback along the way.

This moves the care from reactive to proactive, according to Andrew Welchman, executive vice president of impact at ieso.

“We make a prediction for the expected outcome for a given patient and then look at the performance of the therapist relative to that set of predictions,” Welchman said during the panel. “So because each case is unique, everybody’s presenting the data and profile. You can’t just compare simple cases.”

Advertisement

The company uses the data to help identify trends in care that are effective and those that are not. It can also be used as a tool to help therapists plan out future appointments.

“One of the really interesting things that’s come out of that work is that empathy expressed by the therapist is not very well correlated [to improvement],” Welchman said. “It’s one of the worst predictors. The key point, though, is not that you shouldn’t be empathetic, but actually spending too much time being empathetic is actually not moving the conversation along.”

Digital health startup NOCD, which focuses on providing virtual care to individuals living with obsessive compulsive disorder, has created its own electronic medical record (EMR) system. Providers are able to look at OCD symptom reduction metrics, as well as anxiety, stress and other comorbidities. 

Data tracking can be used not only to look at a patient’s progress, but also to identify clinicians that may be underperforming.

“We can actually identify providers who might need immediate intervention in terms of training and supervision,” Stephen Smith, co-founder and CEO of NOCD, said during the panel. “Everyone of our clinicians goes through a clinician training program. Then they get actively supervised. If someone isn’t seeing a change in [outcomes] that we’re hoping for, our system allows our clinical team to easily identify that provider and provide supervision. …We’re using data just to inform our decision making and better allocate our time.”

Virtual provider data can not only be used to help clinicians make decisions, but also payers.

However, Feuerstein said historically providers have been wary of sharing data with insurers.

“I think we’re afraid, actually as a field, to get too much quantified data because we know it’ll push us to either dealing with sicker patients or more complex patients, or doing things that are more intensive or exhausting,” Feuerstein said. “For us, it will require a reshuffling.”

While data may provide insights to providers about the impact of care, many clinicians have voiced concerns about privacy and the “performative pressure” that having sessions analyzed by supervisors could cause.

Companies featured in this article:

,