This story has been updated from an earlier version
Dr. Thomas Tsang has a background that includes working in community health, serving as a CMO at Merck subsidiary Healthcare Services and Solutions, and a role with the Office of National Coordinator. He also shaped some of the policies and regulations in the Affordable Care Act. Now he’s turning his attention to health IT startup Valera Health, which seeks to develop an infrastructure for behavioral health care coordination.
Maybe it would be overstating things to say technology startups addressing behavioral health represent a popular area, but it is certainly getting a lot of attention with some high profile companies such as Quartet Health, Lyra Health, ShareCare and Big White Wall.
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Still, it’s an open question what will be the winning approach and that’s encouraging a lot of experimentation.
Valera Health is designed to be an end-to-end solution and takes a multifaceted approach that includes patient assessments, data analytics and remote patient monitoring. It takes data sets from providers and payers and uses them to identify patients with chronic conditions with a propensity towards behavioral health problems. It involves patients’ use of an app to report how they feel in a simplified questionnaire. Patients’ use of their mobile devices is assessed to see how active they are, how much they’re read, how much they’ve slept. Another aspect of its program are behavioral health coaches who communicate with patients and the rest of the care team. It also plans to include machine learning.
Among its advisers are Dr. Sachin Jain, CMO at CareMore Health System; Dr. Henry Chung, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the CMO of Montefiore Medical Center, a Pioneer ACO; and Chip Kahn, CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals.
In a phone interview, Tsang, Valera Health CEO and co-founder, said he sees this move as a natural evolution of his career. When he was the CMO at Charles B Wang Community Health Center, which is part of New York University School of Medicine, much of their patient population were uninsured or underinsured Asian immigrants from China and Korea.
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He noted that about 20 percent of its patients had some sort of behavioral health issue, but it only had one psychiatrist who was bilingual — he spoke Mandarin.
There was a high demand for psychosocial services. So they made the psychiatrist a consulting member of its primary care team. “We used a collaborative care model as a way to bring psychosocial services into primary care,” Tsang said. “We found this model extremely effective.”
So despite the fact that a lot of other companies are developing their own approach to integrating technology with behavioral health, Tsang said his background has given him a unique perspective.
“I know what the challenges are, what the issues are and what’s effective. I think that’s critical for developing the next generation of technology to be true to the model.”
Tsang said behavioral health has become a greater priority for some states, given that one in four adults have some sort of mental health problem and more than 60 percent of them are not getting any care. He noted that CMS grants have been awarded to at least 10-12 states with a priority to integrate mental health and medical services within the Medicaid system.
It is in the process of developing pilot projects so payers an clinical partners can assess its platform. It is also in discussions for a pilot with a specialty mental health provider that works with psychosis patients.
Tsang contributed to the development of ACO regulations along with the development of a national framework for the use of health information technology and electronic health records to improve coordination and quality.
Looking back on that work, he expresses frustration with the limited progress of interoperability. On the subject of payment reforms and ACOs, Tsang says the most successful ACOs, are the ones that were fully positioned to do risk-sharing because they had the right care processes and technology infrastructure in place. That kind of balance will inform the success of programs going forward, including his own company.
