Digital health business Ginger.io has been doing a series of collaborations with medical schools and health systems for its smartphone-based mental health applications. It has added a partnership with the Association for Utah Community Health in a public-private partnership with a nonprofit and a couple of community health clinics as way to integrate mental health assessments into primary care, according to a company statement. The Utah program is geared to low-income residents.
Each of the five sites taking part in Utah SmartCare are implementing the technology in different ways. Wasatch Mental Health is applying it for crisis center situations. Health Connections at Weber Human Services is using Ginger.io’s technology to support and improve outreach by case managers on staff.
Cambia Health Foundation is backing the initiative. The goal of the public-private partnership Utah SmartCare is to improve care for high-cost patients with serious mental illness, anxiety and depression, along with a serious physical health condition such as diabetes or heart disease. The initiative will focus on serving low-income patients who are Medicaid beneficiaries or are uninsured, living at or below 200 percent of Federal Poverty Guidelines.
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Dr. Anmol Madan, Ginger.io. co-founder and CEO, indicated that the partnership marked a milestone for the capacity of the company’s technology.
“Up until this point, we haven’t had the technology to effectively measure how patients are feeling outside of a care setting. Now that this remote data is more readily available, we are integrating it with the existing healthcare system and using it to deliver the sort of personalized outreach that improves care for patients and drives down costs, both of which substantially benefit the entire system.”
Juergen Korbanka, the executive director of Wasatch Mental Health said Ginger.io’s approach would help community clinics respond to patients when they’re experiencing stress rather than after the fact. “This will enable us to respond more quickly and avoid more complex interventions,” he said.
Ginger.io’s technology uses sensors that attach to patients’ phones. They can show how many calls patients make and how often they get out of their house. Patients also receive questions that can be customized based on doctors’ needs. They can view passive and active data through a dashboard. It’s not so much a diagnostic tool as a way to help doctors have more meaningful conversations with patients. Ginger,io also has a a direct-to-consumer app called Mood Matters for users to do self assessments for clinical depression, track symptoms, get insights from others on what helped them get better, and developing strategies to recover, and access to a nurse by phone.
