A technology company is looking for clinicians to take part in a pilot study of its mobile therapist app that uses remote patient monitoring to give psychologists a better understanding of their patients emotional health between appointments. It is part of a larger trend — the growth of mental health apps, but particularly a desire by clinicians to have more information about their patients between visits.
SelfEcho developed the Mobile Therapy app, which uses smartphone monitors and daily questions addressed to patients to assess their mood and participation in physical and social activities. The app uses quantitative analysis the assess the answers to those questions as well as a Linguistic Inquiry Word Count to scan patients’ emails for certain keywords, if the patients agree to it. If the app calculates that the patient is having a crisis, it triggers an alert that’s sent to the clinicians dashboard that they should contact the patient. They can also choose to receive that alert through an email or text message.
Update So far, one pilot of 20 clinicians had started and it’s in the process of recruiting more clinicians for a second group that will begin November 1. In each of the pilot groups, clinicians can have up to three patients participate. The second group is seeking 80 clinicians. In a phone interview with Jacques Habra, the CEO and founder, he said he expects the first set of data to be available by mid to late November.
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Habra said the alert is triggered by a number computed by the app based on data the patient provides in response to the daily questionnaire and keywords in their messages. He emphasized that “there’s no way someone could make meaningful use of that data.” When the Mobile Therapy app is “prescribed” to patients to download, it is customized to each user depending on the patient’s condition, treatment plan and their baseline. For example, one patient may be at ease most of the time, but another patient may have a higher level of anxiety and depression day to day, and therefore would have a higher trigger alert. As part of the app, clinicians get a dashboard perspective of each patient that gives them more insight into their patients emotional health.
In addition to Habra, two of the company’s scientific advisers include Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University, and James Pennebaker, who heads up the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin. LIWC is based on Pennebaker’s work at the University of Texas
Habra said what makes him excited about the app it’s developing is its potential to make psychologists available when their patients need them most. Clinicians would pay a flat fee of $50 per month for an unlimited number of patients. It is talking to some private insurers about reimbursement but they want to see the data from the pilots first, Habra said.
A survey by the company found that psychologists are interested in mobile health apps to monitor patients. Self Echo found that 66 percent believe having additional data on clients would improve their ability to treat them. Another 68 percent of the surveyed clinicians said they felt integrating data from apps for mental health tracking into therapy practices could help clinicians advance their profession.
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An IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics report published last year showed that there were 558 apps fitting the description of behavioral health. Although autism accounted for the majority of them, about 96 focused on anxiety and 58 were for depression. (That orange bit at the top of the image is for mental health apps outside of those categories.) The problem with a lot of these apps is that they aren’t designed with a clinician side, so there’s no way for them to track their patients between appointments unless the patient chooses to share the information with them.
Habra agreed and observed that most of these apps were developed by software engineers or developers who lacked a background in clinical psychology.
Update: This post has been updated with additional information following an interview with CEO Jacques Habra.
Update 2: This post has been updated to correct the misspelling of LIWC and to clarify how the platform is used.
Update 3: A spokeswoman for the company said Daniel Gilbert and James Pennebaker are scientific advisers, not co-founders.
