The Federally Qualified Health Center Community Health Network, serving Brazoria, Harris and Galveston counties in Texas, has partnered with Wysa to integrate its AI-led mental health platform to provide additional behavioral healthcare support throughout patients’ care journeys and to provide insights to clinicians and administrators.
Wysa is also deployed at MyCHN for mental health support.
WHY IT MATTERS
Digital mental health tools and AI chatbots can help patients better reach mental health professionals and doctors, from waitlist management to discharge, the announcement said Monday.
The technologies “make access to evidence-based care easier,” said Chaitali Sinha, senior vice president of healthcare and clinical development at Wysa. The stack integrates directly into hospitals’ existing workflows and provides triaging, support programs, companion tools and an analytics dashboard, the company said.
“Accessibility is the biggest barrier to patients receiving mental health care today, and that problem is only exacerbated in underserved communities due to greater barriers,” Sinha said in the statement.
A conversational AI chatbot agent guides users through evidence-based cognitive behavioral techniques, meditation, breathing and mindfulness exercises, as well as micro-actions to build mental resilience skills, the company said.
While the platform provides MyCHN’s physicians and administrators with better insight into patient progress to improve outcomes and utilization, it is also available to support healthcare providers. As an anonymous solution, the AI-powered chatbot can break the stigma and provide immediate access to clinical mental health care.
Demi Minter, clinical director at MyCHN, said the partnership provides patients and physicians with access “wherever they are, whenever they want.”
THE BIG TREND
Chatbots can drive value in patient-led automated systems, said Roeen Roashan, who is now the innovation lead of commercial innovation and development at Novo Nordisk.
In his role as a senior digital health analyst at consulting firm IHS, Roashan said Healthcare IT news that machine learning and chatbots could be effective next-generation public health tools in specific cases.
While a significant workforce is needed to support the virtual healthcare technology value chain, “certain functions of virtual healthcare need to be parsed out and outsourced back to the patient to truly achieve scalability,” he said, noting that an early study found that the Wysa chatbot “delivered amazing results” and built mental resilience among young people.
In that early study, “users who chatted with Wysa had a 45 percent reduction in depression, and adherence increased by a factor of ten.”
A more recent study by the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University Singapore evaluated the dialogues between Wysa and eight other chatbots and scripted user personas created to reflect different cultures, ages and genders, as well as different levels of depressive symptoms. .
Findings published in the Journal of Affective Disorders indicated this in December chatbots are effective in supporting self-management of depression symptoms.
However, while the chatbots were empathetic and did not store or transfer users’ chat history or personal information, they did not offer personalized advice. Mental health chatbots should be improved to support people at risk of suicide, and to further evaluate the long-term effectiveness of AI-led mental health interventions, the researchers said.
“However, these chatbots can still be a useful alternative for people in need, especially those who do not have access to medical care,” says researcher Dr. Laura Martinengo.
“For some people, it’s easier to talk to a machine than to a human.”
ON THE RECORD
“MyCHN understands the importance of affordable, quality care that is accessible to our patients and employees at all times across multiple platforms,” Minter said in a statement. “We believe that every door is the right door to access care for the whole individual, focused on individual needs for the mental well-being of body, mind and spirit.”
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.