Behavioral health staff members have a lot on their plate. The additional strain of documentation time should not be one of them. Fortunately, innovative technology like Eleos can make evidence-based behavioral care a reality, allowing clinicians, providers and networks to measurably and comparatively track treatment and progress. In this interview with Behavioral Health Business, Eleos founder Dror Zaide shares how Eleos has helped providers reduce their documentation time by 50% or more.

Behavioral Health Business: How did you get into the behavioral health space?

Dror Zaide: I am based outside of Boston, and I’m originally from Israel. I am a drone pilot by training. I served in the Israeli Air Force for 13 years in reserve service. Eleven years ago, one of my soldiers tried to take his own life by overdosing. Luckily, we were able to bring him, in time, to the hospital, where the staff there saved his life.

I co-founded the first PTSD workshop for drone pilots that is now used in the Israeli Air Force. I also have family members who are dealing with bipolar disorder. All of this led me to transition my career, move to the U.S., do my MBA at MIT, and at the same time, co-found Eleos.

BHB: What are the top care challenges that you see today in behavioral health?

Zaide: We have a challenge with care quality. Only 30% of people who receive therapy are reporting that they feel better after six months. Additionally, there are reimbursement challenges. Therapists can do all this work and provide good care, but if the documentation isn’t completed properly, their employers are not able to get reimbursed.

On the other hand, sometimes services are paid for when we don’t know the quality of those services. The margins in this business are not high, and it’s really, really challenging to have a sustainable model, for not-for-profit and for-profit organizations alike.

The last major challenge: When we go around the country and talk to community mental health centers, they don’t have enough staff. Their demand is just rising and rising, but they can’t hire enough people to meet the need. There is no magic solution for that. We can’t just have a bunch of clinical social workers and psychologists and psychiatrists appear out of nowhere. We have to solve this challenge in creative ways.

What is Eleos doing to help behavioral health providers get the most out of their staff?

Zaide: We don’t want to replace staff with AI, which is a common concern. We instead want to ensure the highest quality of care from human providers, which is hard. But it starts by reducing documentation time. I am not a clinician, so when we are doing demos of our platform, I will often ask a clinician to come to my computer and test the documentation process. What they see on the screen is our product, and I ask them to type in a few bullet points of documentation for a test session. I’ll tell them, “Don’t invest in how you write it so much; try to write it as if you were telling me as a supervisor what you’ve done. Don’t mind spelling mistakes, don’t mind clinical language—just type it.” I then have the clinician click “generate note,” and they see that even though they entered only a few bullet points, the tool generates a clinically-formatted note that is nearly complete.

That would have otherwise taken 10, 15, 20 minutes, depending on the pace. Instead, with Eleos, it’s two or three minutes, and the resulting note is designed to hit all the requirements from a compliance standpoint. It can then be embedded within an electronic health record, as long as it’s web-based.

If the clinician later uses the same bullet points as prompts, that doesn’t mean they’ll get the same note again. The AI will keep the clinical essence in it, but will find a different way to say it. Just like you can say, “How are you?” in 20 different ways, repetitive text has been reduced in different segments of the notes.

What is the impact of better documentation on staff satisfaction?

Zaide: The smile will come back to their face. It will change their life. We have case managers who went back to school because their time freed up, and they feel like they have a life. They were able to go get their master’s degrees, which I think it’s huge.

Our activation rate is something that we’re very proud of, because you can sit in an office with nice speedy Wi-Fi and nice lights and design the best product in the world, but when we’re working with community mental health organizations, especially in rural areas, those things are not always available. We need to work with the environment that we have. We have refined our training process and achieve upwards of 80% activation within our customer base. When I say ‘activation,’ that means providers actually doing a note or doing a session with Eleos and receiving value from it within 24 hours of training.

That’s fantastic. What clinical and patient health results are you seeing?

Zaide: Providers can serve more people with higher-quality care. I believe we’re the only technology partner with Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) results demonstrating that the clients of providers who use Eleos are two times more engaged in care and achieve three to four times better symptom reduction versus treatment as usual.

In addition, organizations don’t need to spend so much time reviewing each note for compliance. That means fewer denials and better audit scores. It gives CQI teams the ability to review the right notes — the notes that are most prone to be denied.

Overall, the effect on clinicians is huge. They’re happier with their jobs. Think about every service that you’re receiving from every person. If they’re happy that day, or if they’re sad that day, it will change your experience. It doesn’t matter if we are on an Uber ride or buying ice cream. It changes our experience in the same way.

I’m sure people ask you: how is this different from simply copying and pasting from ChatGPT?

Zaide: There are a lot of differences. While both capabilities use generative AI, this one is compliant, secure, embedded within your EHR and trained on real-world behavioral health conversations. Eleos has been deployed in the highest number of behavioral health organizations across the country. There is no other product like it. We actually started in 2020, before ChatGPT was released.

ChatGPT is amazing. Don’t get me wrong. I use it every day, especially when I write emails. But it was trained on data that came from all over the internet, and also social media. The problem with that is that we humans sometimes use data that is not true, so it can invent things.

Eleos was trained on real-world information. When I say real-world information, it’s real-world community mental health conversations. It wasn’t trained on any one ethnic group or any one specific condition. It’s a wide representation of conversations. That is the main difference: it came from a diverse community of real behavioral health centers.

When you look back, what are you most proud of?

Zaide: When we started four years ago, we were a couple of students, and we hadn’t implemented Eleos in a single organization. It was the beginning. Today, we serve dozens of organizations across the country. We have analyzed millions of minutes of behavioral sessions. We’re partnered with the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, mhca, the Zero Suicide Institute and more.

I’m very happy to say that we’re bringing smiles back to a lot of clinical social workers, case managers, clinical psychologists, therapists and counselors in this country who are able to serve more clients, be more attentive to them, use more evidence-based techniques and get more credit for what they are doing by making sure it is properly documented.

Once the daunting experience around documentation is removed, providers are actually doing their notes the same day as services are provided. Usually when we meet organizations, their average completion time is between 48 to 96 hours. We’re able to reduce it to the same day. The result is that people do not focus on what they’re typing. They can actually listen, and know that Eleos has their back.

This article is sponsored by Eleos, and is adapted from Dror Zaide’s presentation at the 2024 Behavioral Health Business VALUE conference. To learn more about what they are bringing behavioral health providers, visit eleos.health.