Health Tech | Fierce Healthcare: All items

Thu Jul 18 10:31:28 PDT 2024

Health Tech | Fierce Healthcare

(https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/providers/fighting-maternal-and-infant-health-inequities) Latest "Podnosis" episode: Fighting maternal and infant health inequities
Jul 18th 2024, 13:31

(https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/teladoc-taps-brightline-expand-pediatric-and-adolescent-mental-health-services) Teladoc taps Brightline to extend mental health for kids, teens
Jul 18th 2024, 13:31

Telehealth giant Teladoc is partnering with startup Brightline to extend virtual mental healthcare services for children, adolescents and their families.
Through the partnership, members under the age of 18 will have access to Brightline's behavioral health solutions through Teladoc's virual "front door," the companies said.
The collaboration with Brightline builds on Teladoc's existing mental health offerings and expands access to care to members of all ages, a Teladoc spokesperson said.

The partnership aims to increase access to mental healthcare providers specifically trained in pediatric, adolescent and family mental health, according to the companies. The youth mental heath offering will support a wide range of conditions and degrees of mental health concerns and enables simplified contracting and management of a comprehensive mental healthcare solution for employers and health plan clients, executives said.
Launched in 2019, Brightline, a (https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/special-report/fierce-healthcare-s-fierce-15-2022#c9cffdab-78e5-4e91-942b-6cf709c423d8) Fierce 15 honoree in 2022, developed a technology-enabled behavioral health home for children and their families focused on providing holistic, measurement-driven care. Brightline's platform offers multidisciplinary care teams and a family-focused approach combined with evidence-based treatments and innovative care delivery models. Care teams include coaches, therapists and prescribers. The company's platform offers digital on-demand support, coaching programs, and extensive clinical services to support families struggling with anxiety, cyberbullying, ADHD and depression.

Brightline is backed by major investors KKR, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Oak HC/FT and Threshold and has raised nearly $190 million to date, including a (https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/brightline-brightside-health-shine-hefty-funding-rounds-virtual-behavioral-health) $105 million series C round in 2022.
The partnership taps into Brightline's "comprehensive and responsive model of care, network of specialists and robust digital platform," said Teladoc Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Vidya Raman-Tangella.
"We believe that access to mental health services earlier in life is a vital first step for younger generations to take charge of their healthcare journeys," Raman-Tangella said.
Those with access to this program will also be able to quickly and easily transition into the broader Teladoc Health ecosystem of care after turning 18, executives said.

There is an increasing focus on youth mental health. Nearly 20% of children and young people ages 3-17 in the United States have a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder, and suicidal behaviors among high school students increased more than 40% in the decade before 2019, according to a 2022 report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. These trends were exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There also is a shortage of providers trained in pediatric and adolescent mental healthcare with about 10,500 practicing child and adolescent psychiatrists in the U.S., or about 14 psychiatrists per 100,000 children, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. This creates significant barriers to mental health treatment, and only half of children and adolescents with diagnosable mental health problems receive the treatment they need, (https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/zLatest_News/Severe_Shortage_Child_Adolescent_Psychiatrists_Illustrated_AACAP_Workforce_Maps.aspx) AACAP data shows.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has said that youth mental health is the "defining public health challenge" facing the country. There is increasing concern about the impact of social media on the mental health of kids and teens and Murthy has called for (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/social-media-youth-mental-health-defining-challenge-time/story?id=111196601) health warnings on social media for younger users.
A new report also highlights a significant gap between the level of support that teenagers feel and the amount that parents think their children have. Only about a quarter of teens said they always get the social and emotional support they need, but parents were nearly three times more likely to think they did, according to a (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr206.pdf) report published this week by the National Center for Health Statistics.
"Children, teens, and families have unique needs and experiences that require a specialized approach that acknowledges and addresses their specific challenges, contexts, and developmental stages," said Myra Altman, M.D., Brightline's chief clinical officer. "We are excited to be partnering with Teladoc to provide easy access to Brightline’s high-quality mental care, including digital support, coaching, therapy, and medication management services to even more families."

(https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/digital-health/intermountain-neuroflow-partner-integrated-behavioral-health-primary-care) Intermountain, NeuroFlow team up on integrated behavioral health
Jul 18th 2024, 13:31

Intermountain Health and NeuroFlow have teamed up to bring behavioral health screening and analytics to primary care patients in Colorado.
The health system will leverage the behavioral health tech company’s integrated care offering to help providers better understand their patients. While the partnership will initially focus on screenings in the primary care setting, Intermountain hopes to expand offerings with time.
NeuroFlow will integrate behavioral health analytics into care workflows and engage patients with relevant digital resources and interventions. It will also provide suicide prevention services to patients and offer outreach from trained crisis professionals. 

The partnership supports Intermountain’s goals to improve outcomes by proactively identifying health needs, which can be difficult at scale. As Intermountain has expanded, it has begun looking to tech solutions to further enable the work of providers without burdening them. 
“This is an important challenge across the country,” Tammer Attallah, LCSW, executive director of Intermountain’s behavioral health clinical program, told Fierce Healthcare. “We’re excited to do this work, to be really proactive about the work we’re doing without putting it on the shoulders of our patients and providers who deliver the care.”
In his role, Attallah is focused on investing in evidence-based practices to improve clinical outcomes. Among those strategies are getting the right diagnosis, directing patients to the right care pathway and importantly, measuring if they are improving. 
“Everybody talks about how we really need to improve access to care—that presumes that that care is effective,” Attallah said. Even among people who have access to behavioral health, only a third get better, he noted. 
Timely connections to the right care increases the likelihood of a patient engaging with that treatment. But understanding their needs well enough to make those connections can be a challenge. Though Intermountain has been screening patients, those solutions haven’t quite hit the mark, per Attallah. 
“We are first and foremost a healthcare system; we are not a technology company,” he said. 
The benefit of a vendor like NeuroFlow is the flexibility to customize solutions and integrate it with the EHR to offer a seamless experience, Attallah added. In the coming months, Intermountain will work with NeuroFlow to co-design the workflow for its implementation in the primary care setting. 

“We don’t believe in creating a workflow from the top down,” Attallah explained. “It’s actually designed from the lens of the providers doing the work day in and day out, as opposed to just imposing a workflow that oftentimes just doesn’t work.”
NeuroFlow executives argue its technology can surface often hidden behavioral risks and help address them early.
“Capturing accurate behavioral health data at scale can be incredibly challenging, particularly when organizations rely on in-person screenings alone,” Jeremy Kreyling, SVP of Healthcare Informatics at NeuroFlow, said in a press release. NeuroFlow works to engage patients throughout many digital touchpoints and uses AI to understand their acuity in real time, he added. “Having actionable population insights unlocks new opportunities for organizations like Intermountain to increase enrollment and engagement in integrated care programs, with an added layer of outreach for patients experiencing suicide ideation.” 
The established cadence of behavioral health screens for Intermountain’s primary care patients will be at least annually, per Attallah, but will likely vary depending on the specific needs of different patient groups.

(https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/ai-and-machine-learning/suki-brings-ai-scribes-community-health-centers-limited-cash-flow) Suki brings AI scribes to four community health centers
Jul 18th 2024, 13:31

Four more community health centers are implementing Suki AI’s ambient scribe in their clinics, the company announced on Thursday.
Utah Navajo Health System (UNHS), CenterPlace Health, Access Health Louisiana and PrimeCare Health will use Suki AI in their practices. Many community health clinics have been seeking an AI assistant, a Suki representative said, but can’t afford those on the market. 
Suki AI is now partnered with nearly a dozen Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and community health centers (CHCs). Community health centers, FQHCs and rural health clinics (RHCs) often care for complex patients while the practice itself has limited resources.

“These organizations do tend to have extremely complex patients with many different conditions. And so allowing the conditions to focus on them during the visit rather than on documentation is incredibly important.” Tracy Rentz, senior vice president of customer success and operations at Suki, told Fierce Healthcare.
A provider at the Utah Navajo Health System told Suki she can now see herself continuing to practice medicine because of the assistive capabilities of Suki in clinical note documentation and billing.
“Utah Navajo Health … They are on the Navajo reservation, up in Utah. It's a very remote location. About 95% of their patients are reservation residents and many do have a number of chronic conditions [and] complexity in terms of the conditions that are being treated,” Jennivine Lee Simon, vice president of marketing at Suki, said. “They've been on board with Suki for a number of months and have seen an alleviation of administrative burden and burnout from using Suki.”
At $399 per provider per month, Suki’s list price is already lower than many other solutions, Simon said, but the company can offer discounts to help lower-resourced practices afford the solution. 

Simon said some clinics have received grants to pay for Suki.
“What we know from talking to our customers and the FQHCs that are interested in Suki is that they're very much looking for documentation solutions, ambient scribing solutions, but because they do have limited financial resources, some of the other solutions on the market are really out of reach for them,” Simon said. “And so that's a key reason why they select Suki because we have a price point that works within their budgets.”

Suki also helps the cash-strapped clinics get paid more in some cases. 
Suki is able to increase a practice’s return on investment by up to nine times in one year, the company claims. By saving time on documentation, Suki can also help increase encounter volume and get more patients into the clinic. 
Moreover, providers have said that the ambient documentation tool captures more information from the clinical interaction. Because of ambient listening, providers say they are able to get reimbursement for services that were rendered but not previously documented due to time constraints.

(https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/ai-and-machine-learning/gen-ai-human-drafted-patient-messages-similar-quality-though-tech-more) Study: Gen AI can match clinicians in drafting patient messages
Jul 18th 2024, 13:31

Electronic health record messages to patients drafted by generative AI were of similar quality and accuracy to those written by healthcare professionals, according to a newly published study conducted using queries from NYU Langone Health patients.
(https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2821167) The analysis, headed by researchers at the system’s affiliate NYU Grossman School of Medicine, had 16 primary care physicians rate AI and human drafts without knowing how each was written.
Among a sample of 334 AI-drafted messages and 169 from professionals (both physicians and non-physicians), the raters found both sets to be on par regarding informational content, completeness and whether the grader would use the draft or start again from scratch.

The findings “suggest chatbots could reduce the workload of care providers by enabling efficient and empathetic responses to patients’ concerns,” study lead William Small, M.D., of the medical school, said in a release.
There were specific areas in which the message responses drafted by the AI—a private instance of OpenAI’s Chat GPT-4—were rated more and less favorably than the human drafts, the researchers wrote.
AI drafts deemed to be usable were rated as more empathetic than usable drafts from humans. They also had higher ratings for understandability and tone and were more likely to use language conveying positivity and affiliation with the patients.
Of note, a subsequent analysis found that human drafts penned by physicians, rather than non-physicians, rated more poorly on communication quality, though the researchers speculated that the finding could result from the physicians tackling more challenging patient questions than their colleagues.
At the same time, researchers wrote that the technology drafted responses that were 38% longer and 31% more likely to include complex language, writing at an eighth-grade level as opposed to human drafters’ sixth-grade level.

The researchers pointed to complexity as a key area for future improvement and warned that more linguistically complex responses could be preferred by physicians rating and using the drafts. That preference could “burden those with low health or English literacy,” and could contribute to concerns of the technology furthering health inequities.

The technology’s draft performance also tended to vary between subject or message type, with the researchers calling out lab results in particular as an area in need of further refinement.
Smoothing down the rough edges of generative AI-drafted patient messages could be worth the time for providers. NYU Langone is among the many healthcare organizations that saw an uptick in patient messages and virtual communications in recent years. Health system physician saw a 30% annual increase in recent years in the number of messages received daily, according to an (https://medium.com/nyu-langones-health-tech-hub/how-were-improving-physicians-messaging-experience-through-digital-tools-1c0abd8e711b) article by Paul A. Testa, MD, chief medical information officer at NYU Langone. Is not uncommon for physicians to receive more than 150 In Basket messages per day, Testa wrote.
The resulting burdens for responding physicians has not only been financially inefficient but a contributing factor to practitioners’ stress and burnout.
“This work demonstrates that the AI tool can build high-quality draft responses to patient requests,” Devin Mann, M.D., corresponding author and senior director of informatics innovation in NYU Langone’s Medical Center Information Technology, said in a release. “With this physician approval in place, GenAI message quality will be equal in the near future in quality, communication style, and usability to responses generated by humans,”
While (https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/providers/more-health-systems-are-billing-electronic-patient-provider-messages-study-shows) several organizations have tackled the influx by attaching charges to the most time-consuming responses, (https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/ochsner-health-pilots-generative-ai-draft-messages-patients) others have taken NYU’s approach and explored how generative AI could cut down the workload.
Additionally, (https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/ai-and-machine-learning/kaiser-permanente-uses-ai-redirect-simple-patient-messages-physician) a study published in April from Kaiser Permanente researchers explored another approach in which algorithms attached category labels to patient messages. The system would then direct the messages to respondents with the appropriate level of expertise, saving the most complicated queries for physicians and allowing medical assistants or teleservice representatives handle the others.

Forwarded by:
Michael Reeder LCPC
Baltimore, MD

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