One of the biggest gaps in healthcare is access to behavioral health, which, as some studies have shown, poses a major challenge from how fast people recover from an illness and helps patients manage a chronic condition or prevents people from developing one in the first place. That problem is only likely to worsen when millions of previously uninsured people are added to the health system as part of the Affordable Care Act.
In a fireside chat at a conference about patient engagement, Marcia Guida James, the director of patient engagement at Humana (NYSE:HUM), addressed a question about how to improve behavioral health access.
She said the managed care organization is working on a pilot program to encourage behavioral health resources more widely available from substance abuse help to depression and other conditions, though she could not get into the details.
“We are looking at ways to incentivize providers from a primary care and behavioral health perspective. Telemedicine could be one venue but Humana is still evaluating that,” James said. “There are chronic mental health conditions, but what if you’re depressed? You could end up developing a chronic condition,” she said. “Mental health hasn’t really been in the spotlight but its time is coming.”
Improving access to behavioral health is a challenge that several different companies are trying to resolve. Telehealth is an increasingly popular approach that several companies are offering that’s being slowly adopted. HealthSpot, for example, is talking to employers to make its kiosks available so that staff could chat with a psychologist in a secure video conference. Others are looking at heath IT options. Peer. is a startup that’s developing a social network to help support people with behavioral health issues as well as connect caregivers, friends and family to identify helpful resources.
Polaris Health Directions developed an intervention tool to assesses psychosocial distress in cancer patients. It also evaluates risky alcohol and drug use and smoking that can integrate behavioral health information with electronic medical record so providers take a more active stance in patients’ mental healthcare.
