The Atlanta-based health system is incorporating NeuroFlow's digital health platform into a new collaborative care model aimed at improving behavioral health treatment in primary care clinics.
Emory Healthcare is embracing digital health tools in a new program designed to integrate behavioral health services at primary care clinics.
The Atlanta-based 11-hospital, 250+ site health system and the Goizueta Institute @ Emory Brain Health are partnering with NeuroFlow to complement and scale Emory's collaborative care model (CoCM), part of the health system's Integrated Behavioral Health (IBJ) program, as part of the effort to improve access to behavioral health services throughout the Emory Healthcare network.
That includes adding in NeuroFlow's digital health platform, which gives patients on-demand access to psychotherapy resources, including self-directed content, and charts a patient's progress in key mental health benchmarks between office visits.
“We want to be able to reach patients in a timely manner and bring treatment to where they are most likely to be identified as having a psychiatric problem, which is the primary care setting,” Brandon Kitay, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of Emory's behavioral health integration, said in a press release.
“While CoCM is a robust, evidence-based practice model with clear benefits for patients, it has a lot of moving parts that make it difficult to sustain and scale," he added. "We hope that leveraging innovative technologies that integrate patient data directly into our medical record system will extend our reach, afford new opportunities to interact with patients between scheduled visits, and scale our clinical volume by relieving some of the administrative burdens through more efficient infrastructure."
"This collaboration introduces the type of technology needed to assist our healthcare providers and patients in bridging the gap between mental and physical health," William McDonald, PhD, chair of Emory's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, said in the press release. “While our teams already practice collaborative, integrated care, this partnership serves as a driving force to expand and enhance these endeavors throughout the Emory ecosystem, ultimately resulting in improved outcomes and reduced costs.”
The collaboration is also highlighted in a pilot program targeting suicide prevention. The platform will be used to identify patients at real-time risk of suicide and generate alerts to providers.
“Suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death in the United States and the current approaches of identifying and responding to patients at risk of self-harm are not sufficient to address this crisis,” Kitay pointed out. “This collaboration gives our clinicians more data points and key insights they need to better identify warning signs and help save lives.”
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation, Technology, and Pharma for HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Emory Healthcare has launched a new collaborative care model (CoCM) as part of its Integrated Behavioral Health (IBH) program, aimed at integrating more behavioral health services in primary clinics throughout the health system.
As part of that program, the health system is including a real-time digital health platform from NeuroFlow, which gives patients instant access to resources and tracks key health metrics.
The collaboration will also serve as the foundation for a new suicide prevention program.