Wellframe, a digital health startup that works with health plans to extend care management, is collaborating with Darmouth Centers for Health and Aging on a two-year study. It’s designed to evaluate the effectiveness of digital health tools to help people with serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, manage their chronic conditions. It will focus on middle-aged adults and older.
These individuals are deemed to be at high risk of early mortality because they struggle with the combined challenge of having a major psychiatric condition along with diabetes or heart disease.
“We hope to demonstrate that this program using mobile technology can result in improved self-management among individuals with serious psychiatric and physical conditions,” said Dr. Stephen J. Bartels, a professor and director of Dartmouth Centers for Health and Aging.
Here’s how the study is structured. It will walk users through a daily health checklist, sent directly to the participants’ mobile phone. They will receive reminders about their daily health tasks and can track their progress, including medication adherence and physical activity. They can also view content to improve their understanding of their condition. A clinician dashboard will enable Dartmouth’s medical team to check participants’ progress and send relevant, personalized messages to provide instructions or to encourage them.
Dartmouth’s Illness Management and Recovery program will be delivered through Wellframe’s Intelligent Care Management Platform.
In a phone interview, Wellframe CEO Jacob Sattelmair said commercial partnerships and care delivery programs start with physical health, but it sees a lot of growth opportunities on the behavioral health side.
Although this study marks its first collaboration with Dartmouth, Sattelmair said its platform has been used with other partners such as McLean Hospital, Havard’s psychiatric affiliate, and Vinfen. It has worked with Wellframe for the past two years and it is currently using it in a Phase 2 randomized clinical trial with patients who are bipolar or have schizophrenia. More recently, it has collaborated with Thresholds.
