Dive Brief:
- ODH, a provider of behavioral health analytics, and IBM Watson Health have released a population health management tool to help managed care groups.
- The platform, called Mentrics, targets three areas — behavioral health population management, provider network performance and patient care coordination.
- According to the CMS, treatment costs for people with mental health diagnoses is 75% higher than for patients with other medical conditions, and lack of care coordination often drives those costs higher.
Dive Insight:
The offering marks another tool in the rise of the mental health startups and/or digital tools.
For example, last October, Lyra Health, co-founded by former Facebook CFO David Ebersman, announced it raised $35 million to develop its screening tools to identify employees with mental health and substance abuse issues, match them with the right healthcare provider, and track outcomes.
Ann Lamont, a managing partner with Oak Investment Partners, told MedCity News last October that new behavioral health player "are providing a way to address the challenge of improving care for dual eligibles."
“I think the technology…is finally at the point where the user sees the value, understands it’s easy to do and that allows better access and removes stigma concerns. We’re at the tipping point with behavioral telemedicine and I think we’re going to see over the next few years that it’s going to grow by leaps and bounds,” Julian Cohen, president of behavioral health sciences at Teledoc, told Healthcare Dive last month.
Mentrics will work with the Watson Health Cloud to gather a patient’s health data from disparate sources and aggregate it into a platform to help coordinated care. Among the information captured will be physical and behavioral health services the individual has received, and prescription claims.
For population management, users can customize their target populations using 22 different dimensions, including a model specifically designed for behavioral health risk stratification. At the individual level, Mentrics creates a longitudinal picture of each patient’s treatment history and uses predictive analytics to identify those higher-cost and higher-risk patients for potential intervention.