Health IT, Startups

Quartet Health sees behavioral health care coordination as a tech challenge

Companies like Quartet Health are trying to resolve the challenge of aggregating data from mental health and primary care physicians to provide a clearer view of the patient.

One of the many problems healthcare startups are trying to solve is how to best serve people with chronic conditions with an underlying mental health issue. More to the point, how do you uncover who has one, connect them with a behavioral health professional who can help them and share that information with their care team?

Patients with chronic conditions who also have underlying mental health issues, such as depression, tend to incur higher healthcare costs. Companies like Quartet Health are trying to resolve the challenge of aggregating data from mental health and primary care physicians to provide a clearer view of the patient, their needs, their progress and to follow up with their care.

When Quartet Health announced that Dr. David Wennberg would head up its analytics team earlier this month, he said he saw an opportunity to apply some principles of shared decision-making and lessons from unwarranted practice pattern variation to the behavioral health space.

Wennberg previously worked as CEO of the Northern New England Accountable Care Collaborative and founded population health company Health Dialog, where he also served as CSO and COO.

From Wennberg’s description of the business, it is first and foremost a technology company with a behavioral health focus. It wants to use technology to identify patients in need of counseling and match their needs with specific providers by making better use of existing services. It would also seek to improve communication with primary care physicians and behavioral health providers.

“Our primary focus initially was on the most common conditions with the biggest opportunities to improve care, such as substance abuse disorders, anxiety,” Wennberg said. “We’re expanding that into six significant areas such as biopolar disorders as well as things like chronic pain,” which can overlap with psychological problems.

It uses predictive analytics to generate advanced insights on patient populations with behavioral health conditions who also have physical health conditions. The company uses this data engine to power its cloud-based platform to improve collaboration between medical providers and behavioral health providers.

Although populations underserved by mental health professionals are an ongoing challenge, that obstacle is increased exponentially by no-shows — people who fail to turn up for their appointment because they are scared, they have no way of getting to the appointment, or any number of issues. It’s a problem that goes well beyond behavioral health and plenty of health IT companies are stepping up to try to resolve it.

“Even in areas where there are access problems, no-shows are so high in these areas so we get behavioral health providers with idle time,” Wennberg said. “One piece [of the puzzle] is to make sure the behavioral health providers get a full schedule.”

It also sees an opportunity to support training and incentives for behavioral health providers to encourage more short-term goal therapy. It wants to do more with virtual care, too.

“There’s been a lot of interesting work recently, particularly in behavioral health integration…We’re trying to create collaborative care and virtual collaborative care where patients have the same types of things available in face to face and virtual interactions.”

The company, founded last year by Arun Gupta and Steve Shulman, has raised roughly $7 million to date. Among its investors are Fidelity Biosciences, Polaris Partners, Shulman Ventures and Ann Lamont, a managing partner at Oak HC/FTOak HC/FT.

Among some of the other technology companies taking on mental health access and care coordination are Lyra Health and Regroup Therapy.

Photo: Bigstock Photo

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