As society’s focus on mental health intensifies, technology stands at the forefront of this evolving narrative. Listen in as this group of experts examines technology’s paradoxical role in mental wellbeing: constant connectivity that reveals insights yet also increases burnout due to poor design, and social media, where overuse is linked to decreased mental health but provides a beacon of hope through innovation. Hear about the challenges and opportunities of using technology to enhance mental health, exploring how digital advancements can be harnessed for a healthier, more balanced future.    Featuring the following panel at SXSW Conference: Moderator: David Feinberg, M.D., Chairman, Oracle Health Danny Gladden, MBA, MSW, LCSW, Director, Behavioral Health and Social Care, Oracle Health Tracy Neal-Walden, Ph.D., Chief Clinical Officer, Cohen Veteran Network Michelle Patriquin, Ph.D., Director of Research, Associate Professor, Menninger    Listen as they discuss:

• The moment realized, that access to care needs to be fixed (0:40
• What is happening from a technological standpoint that is helping individuals, patients, families, and communities (4:33)
  • The use of iPads
  • Research assistance
  • The collection of outcomes data
• An example of something done based on data to change the way that care is delivered (6:20)
  • The role of sleep
  • Post-treatment and post-discharge risks
  • Q15 (15-minute patient safety) checks
• Example of the effectiveness of telehealth (9:15)
  • Prior and post-pandemic
  • Impacts on standard measures
    • Additional data insights
  • Impact on no-show appointments
• Using technology to tell a fuller story (12:45)
  • Wearable devices
  • Digital therapeutics and inputs
  • Research to practice gap and the potential of technology (15:38)
• Concerns with technology not helping or distracting from human connection (17:05)
  • Social media and the link to depression (17:50)
  • People who are left behind; technology access and literacy (19:00)
  • Psychologic safety of technologies (20:00)
  • Concerns from the clinician perspective (20:45)
    • Helping clinicians with documentation and proper training of tools
    • leveraging AI (21:44)
    • Clinician burnout (22:34)

Notable quotes:  “This is why I love wearables, and I’ve always loved wearables, psychophysiology, because it fills a tremendous gap in our ability to measure the dynamic fluctuations and the way our emotions and behaviors change.” Michelle Patriquin, Ph.D., Director of Research, Associate Professor, Menninger (15:10)   Learn more about how Oracle behavioral health solutions combine real-time clinical data from across each patient’s unique healthcare journey.   Watch on-demand and live webcasts by registering for Oracle Health Inside Access.   ——————————————————–   Episode Transcript:

00:00:00

You’re listening to Perspectives on Health and Tech, a podcast by Oracle with conversations about connecting people, data and technology to help improve health for everyone.

00:00:11

David My name’s David. I’m the chairman of Oracle Health. And before I introduce this esteemed panel, there’s a few patients that I’ve cared for, and I’m a child psychiatrist that have just stuck with me. And for a lot of reasons. Well, I actually feel like for whatever long I’ve been in this 30 plus years, I’m just trying to make it better for these patients and their families.

00:00:34

David So let me describe them. And I think it really sets the stage for the role of technology in mental health. Okay. This little girl in third grade at the local school where my kids actually went to school writes in her haiku poem that she wants to commit suicide. And this is pre cell phone guys pre technology. The teacher reads the haiku poem and tells the prince at home that night tells the principal.

00:01:01

David The next morning, the principal then calls the mother at home. And then this is L.A. And because they knew people, they were able to get in to see me in three weeks. And I was like, my God, if my kid was suicidal, it doesn’t matter who, you know, you got to be seen today, right? I didn’t know this word, but I know.

00:01:22

David And now I’m going to fix access. I mean, that’s what we use is this term access to me is my kid is suicidal and I’m calling an 800 number and my insurance doesn’t cover it or I got to pull strings and God forbid I’m from the other side of the tracks where I don’t know anyone. I will never get it like.

00:01:40

David So how can technology help there? Right now, I think what we’re supposed to talk about, too, is the negative part of technology, right? I’m stuck on my phone. I’m not I’m not socializing. I’m, you know, we all go to dinner and we’re like this instead of actually being together. So why don’t we go down the line and introduce yourselves?

00:02:03

Michelle Okay, everybody, I’m Michel Patrick Quinn, and I’m a psychologist and a child psychologist, and I’m director of research at the Menninger Clinic and an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine. I’m excited for this conversation. The Menninger Clinic is really known for humane treatment of mental illness. We are historic, known as an inpatient psychiatric hospital and really revolutionary and something called the therapeutic milieu.

00:02:30

Michelle And so kind of actively intervene and doing psychotherapy while someone is inpatient. So it’s not a passive intervention. And it’s really just remarkable. We still hold on to that kind of psychotherapy within an inpatient context.

00:02:47

Tracy I am Tracy Neal Walden. I’m a clinical health psychologist. I work for I’m the chief clinical officer for Coimbatore and Network. We’re a network of mental health clinics across the US. We have clinics in 16 states covering, supporting 25 states. So and that’s because of telehealth. So we utilize we don’t do solely telehealth, but we’ve been able to utilize telehealth in order to expand our reach across the US.

00:03:18

Tracy I’m also a veteran of the United States Air Force. I served for 24 years and served as a psychologist during that time in the Air Force as well. We serve not only the veteran but the veteran’s family members. As a veteran, myself, my family doesn’t have access to care in the VA, and that’s no fault of the VA.

00:03:37

Tracy It’s the way the system is set up. And so we’re able to reach and provide those resources to families and in a much shorter time period, especially due to the advances that we’re going to be talking about now with technology,

00:03:53

Danny Thank you and so I’m Danny Gladden. I’m the director of behavioral health and social care for Oracle.

00:03:59

Danny Happy to be the social worker on the stage. And I really proud to work with just a whole group of social workers in the delivery of mental health services and all the great work social workers do.

00:04:11

David Today, what in your organizations is happening from a technological standpoint that you think is improving access, improving quality, democratizing care, making care more affordable, more culturally sensitive, helping with, you know, inequities that we know that are in care? What are you doing to harness technology that’s actually helping individuals, patients, families, communities? Sorry, go for it.

00:04:34

Michelle Yeah. So it’s not really revolutionary in any way, but we use iPads and research assistants and collect outcomes data across our whole hospital and with inpatients in outpatients, outpatients, it’s pretty standard. People are able to complete, you know, outcomes, measure, self-report, inpatient. It gets more complicated. And we have to we have to guide people, help people. Some good times, people resist, don’t want to do it, and that’s fine.

00:05:00

Michelle They don’t do it. But that to me is the foundation, right? So if you collect outcomes data that gives people a voice in their treatment, particularly on inpatient. So our inpatient units are locked units, you have reduced someone’s on autonomy when you measure how they’re doing, from their perspective, it gives them some control back. And I think that is one of the most powerful things that we can do is give people control back through data and measuring these things and measuring the change over time.

00:05:32

Michelle Whether it’s positive or negative. And technology allows us to do that. So many of our patients want to use the iPad, and then we visualized the data in graphs that are provided to the treatment team through our electronic health record. And so that gives data driven feedback that the treatment teams can actually provide to the patients at the patient level.

00:05:50

Michelle We also use it for research to understand like aggregate results, what’s working for who and what’s not. But I think, you know, I’m biased, I’m director of research, so I love data. I’m the PI over our outcomes. But I think that’s tremendous. And we can advocate for better inpatient environments, better inpatient care, better inpatient outcome.

00:06:12

David Can you? I think it’s a great example. First of all, the simplicity of it is sometimes to make things simple. It’s really hard and so this is great. Can you give an example of something you’ve done based on the data to change how care is delivered?

00:06:23

Michelle Yes. So well, something we’re working on right now, all of our results are lining up really around the role of sleep. One thing we are constantly thinking about is suicide risk with inpatient, and particularly suicide risk post-discharge for those of you who may not know post-discharge from inpatient is the highest risk period for suicide. Over and above any other time in someone’s life and also relapse.

00:06:52

Michelle So post in our highest level of care. And to us that is incredibly concerning. So we have been really thinking about the role of sleep as well as other measures and look at longitudinally outcomes while someone’s inpatient what is predicting suicide risk and we have a paper that we published, we showed it is sleep over and above everything else that you can put in the model.

00:07:16

David And you measure using our rings and things like that or how are you.

00:07:18

Michelle Not yet. We are now because it is so important and we’ve now designed our own like API and with wearables to replace things that we do in inpatient that actually disrupt sleep. So like you, 15 checks and these checks. So there’s checks done on inpatient to ensure someone’s safety and sound checks. And these are often pretty disruptive. We have data now from active Griffey that we’ve lined up with the checks in about 75% of those checks.

00:07:48

Michelle So someone going in their room, usually a stranger that they do not know, opens the door, sometimes shines a flashlight in their face to make sure that they’re breathing and that they’re asleep. Or if they’re not asleep, they’ll ask them to raise their hand. And so and for us at our hospital, it’s every 15 minutes that happens. That equals about 36 times a night.

00:08:06

Michelle Someone comes in their room. So we’ve designed our own kind of in-house homegrown system to replace that. And that is one and it’s just one thing that, like we always say, you know, when technology is, you know, going to take over and ruin people’s privacy, things like that. But in that situation, it improves people’s privacy. People can sleep and be and have intact sleep.

00:08:29

Michelle Great. So it’s that and that has just that’s one of our favorite examples. Right. Just kind of generic outcomes data into a new intervention that leverages technology that improves some of these outcomes. Hopefully in the end we’re still working on it, but so cool.

00:08:46

Tracy Yeah. I think it’s really interesting what Michelle just discussed in terms of outcomes because we do measurement based care for all of our clients. So we measure their, their symptoms at every session and we do that via iPad. If they come into the clinic or we push it out electronically for those who are being seen for via telehealth.

00:09:10

Tracy And one thing that we found is that we actually we want to take a look at how effective is telehealth, because many people say it’s not effective. You know, prior to the pandemic, people were very skeptical. And we actually use this data and we have a research institute that’s part of our and veterans network. And within the institute, they reviewed the data recently and we found clinically significant change in Q nine scores is for depressed individuals and for those with PTSD, a clinically significant change in their PCL.

00:09:50

Tracy So these are the measures that are the standard measures given for those populations. And not only did we find clinically significant change, but we also found that those individuals were in remission. That’s one of the things that I love about technology. It allows us to get those additional data insights. We rolled out telehealth in 2018, so before the pandemic, and we did it to improve access and not just access due to long wait, but to decrease no shows in to improve that accessibility for clients who were already in care.

00:10:29

Tracy I remember a few years ago I had a client and we would advertise in our clinic. We had rolling slides that would tell about the different things that we offered, and we had a slide that talked about telehealth and it said, Ask your clinician if you’d like to know more about it. And my client came in that day and said, Hey, would I be a candidate for telehealth because I fall asleep on the drive home from here and I was like, Yes, you being silly.

00:10:59

Tracy And that’s also the beauty of telehealth, because it also it allows you to oftentimes squeeze additional appointments in if someone knows shows and it helps to prevent no shows, too, because oftentimes some people like to come in, they will they like to come in and see their clinician face to face, which is great. But sometimes life gets in the way.

00:11:23

Tracy And so if someone calls to say, hey, I’m going to be late, then we say, Would you like to convert that to a telehealth appointment so that they don’t have to miss that appointment?

00:11:34

David Okay, Danny, take us home on that wonders of technology. Yeah. Then we’re going to flip it.

00:11:39

Danny We’re going to flip it. Okay, Well, so. So for Oracle, we build tools. We build tools to ensure that the work that providers are doing with consumers of care have what they need to sort of ensure that that, you know, the clinical experience checks the box so that, you know, the 15 minute check that Michelle was mentioning is something that happens in our tools and the screening and the screening that happens in our tools.

00:12:05

Danny We’ve embedded in the workflow for nurses, for oncologists, for the ED attending. We’ve embedded in the workflow a suicide screening tools and, and then and then alerts so that if someone is at risk, it’s not just one person who’s aware, but the entire treatment team can have this ability face up to this type of information. And so we sort of want to help folks use digital tools to be able to track patient information, to be able to get folks get folks in quicker.

00:12:37

Danny But I think beyond that, the beauty of technology in general is there’s an opportunity to tell a fuller story, you know, through wearables, through some of the cognitive behavioral interventions, the digital therapeutics. It just really provides a variety of different types of modalities for consumers of care to be able to sort of deliver inputs about their experience.

00:13:02

Danny You know, if I have to get in the car, drive to a clinic to see Michelle in person, I’m putting on a mask. And all you really know about this individual is probably what happened an hour or two before they got to you. Like it’s the stress of the moment using wearables, using sort of digital inputs throughout the week in between sessions, I’m able to I’m able to sort of have a more holistic picture of what your week looked like.

00:13:31

Danny And because you’re doing the session in your own home, you don’t have to put on a mask. It is more intimate. And I’m able to, as the provider, just have a more holistic picture of what I’m working with. Okay. 

00:13:45

Tracy Can I add one more thing?

00:13:46

David You could add ten more things.

00:13:47

Tracy It gives you more accurate information. You know, as I was thinking about what you were saying, Danny, about the technology and you, Michelle, when you were talking about sleep, sleep is one of the number one concerns within mental health. People may come in with issues such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, but there’s usually an underlying sleep problem. And as a health psychologist, I love to treat sleep, but clients history directly underrepresented the amount of sleep that they actually get.

00:14:19

Tracy And by using something like a wearable, a watch or a ring, you get that accurate data that then you can immediately share with them or they can see it immediately themselves.

00:14:32

Michelle I completely, completely agree with Tracy and Danny, and I think the beauty of the data when we talk about outcomes data, self-reported data, those data are collected, you know, every week. So you have huge gaps in the information that you are getting about somebody’s experience. You know, our emotions can change within seconds. You know, there’s a you know, can be a traumatic event happen or just a, you know, an argument with someone.

00:15:01

Michelle So our lives and our emotions behaviors are very dynamic and our outcome measures and the data that we have now is why I love wearables. And I’ve always loved wearables, psycho physiology, because it fills a tremendous gap in our ability to measure the dynamic fluctuations and the way our emotions and behaviors change. That is so important, I think, for understanding the ultimate outcome and just that that the kind of higher temporal resolution of the data is something we don’t have now in practice.

00:15:36

Michelle There’s such a research to practice gap there that I think technology will certainly fill in and also has the potential. And one reason I love the wearables, because it really demonstrates that it’s not all in your head. Yes, too, when you do a self report, that is your perception, right, of how you feel in and with the wearables, too, it gives an objective marker for the first time in vivo in the situation to show, Hey, I’m really experiencing this, this is real, this is how I’m inside.

00:16:11

Danny Yeah. And I think about this just real quick. Like in our.

00:16:14

David Now we’re cooking.

00:16:14

Danny Yeah, I mean, well, in our discipline historically, you know, we don’t we don’t get access to labs, We don’t get access to some, you know, some good radiology scan. We find out something about someone by asking a bunch of really nosy and intrusive questions by observation or someone has sort of engaged, you know, has had a crisis in their, you know, the courts or corrections or a probation and it is point in time, like, how many times do you start a session where, you know, how have you been since I saw you,fine, right.

00:16:49

Danny I mean, and that’s sort of the starting point. So the ability to have real time inputs, the seven or the 14 days in between the times of seeing each other it just enriches the clinical experience so much.

00:17:03

David We’re flipping gears. What are your concerns around tech not helping us, tech distracting us from human connection?

00:17:14

Danny I’ll start us here. And so, you know, I, I still see I still see a few clients from time to time. I particularly enjoy working with adolescents and sort of the narrative from adolescence in the stories they sort of come up with in their mind about the world around them is really quite distorted, you know, based on the stories they get from social media.

00:17:40

Danny And I’m not talking about sort of what fake news, which is its own lane, but sort of the attitude that, you know, folks around me are just having a much better experience than I am. And what we all know is that there’s likely all of it is inflated a little bit or a lot of it.

00:17:59

Danny Right. And so we know this. We know that the data on sort of overuse of social media and the link to depression and anxiety in young people is real. What we are seeing, though, is that transition, you know, it’s not. So if I’m down, I’m feeling bad about myself. I’m now starting to engage in, you know, in ways to numb that pain.

00:18:25

Danny And that’s, you know, through self-harm, through self-injury. It’s, you know, through alcohol use or other substances or it’s sort of engaging in relationships that are unhealthy. So I’m really I’m from the adolescents that I get to work with. I’m really concerned about that. On the other side, the part that concerns me about tech is, is I mean, we’ve just sat here and talked about all of the benefits that technology can bring, the access, the data, physio, bio physiology data.

00:18:55

Danny But the problem is there are people left behind, there are people left behind in the in the most remote parts of Alaska. There are there are folks that are left behind within a, you know, a mile radius around here. And so, you know, we have to ensure that that the tools that are created impact and benefit all of the people.

00:19:19

Danny And you know, so I think tech access, tech literacy, all are concerning to me as so much of our particular discipline moves into the tech space.

00:19:30

Michelle I’ll kind of jump off from there. You know, I think when, you know, I’m not in the tech space, but I love technology. But I think technology does such a good job with some of these data privacy issues, and they do a lot in terms of the technicalities of how things are going to work with the interface. Looks like is are there protections in place, right, that safety is built in?

00:19:54

Michelle I think one thing that is forgotten, though, and, you know, I don’t know if we even knew that was going to be a consequence is no one was testing the psychological safety of these technologies, especially when it comes to social media. Right. As we, you know, are kind of zooming forward with technology. There’s all these, you know, kind of ethical safety guidelines, American Psychological Association.

00:20:18

Michelle These are really good job at starting to think about the psychological safety. What are the psychological kind of safety parameters that we need to test as we develop new technologies? But also then how do we put the guardrails up on the things that are here now?

00:20:35

David Tell me other things that concern you about technology and mental health.

00:20:39

Tracy I actually have another thing, and I’m going to shift it a little bit. I get concerned from the clinician perspective because we’ve technology has really helped us. We instead of, you know, giving a and I remember when we gave out the paper and pencil measures to our clients when they came in to the door, you had to wait for them to finish it.

00:21:01

Tracy But the good thing about that is when they did, then I immediately had it. I reviewed the scores. Now measures are sent to us, you know, automatically, and then they go into our system. And so you really have to train the clinicians to utilize that data and not just have the client submit their data without it being utilized.

00:21:29

Tracy Someone could submit data that could indicate that their risk status has changed. And if it’s not being looked at, that’s a huge concern. We’re also looking at ways to help clinicians with documentation. However, a concern that I have with that too, is that, you know, if you’re using AI to do your documentation, there could potentially be errors. And so we have to train our clinicians to properly utilize these wonderful technologies so that they can use them effectively.

00:22:03

David Yeah, we’re working really hard on that. I think we’ve got good stuff coming out.

00:22:08

Danny Well, yeah, and, and actually so big because we don’t have labs and radiology scan to sort of show a paper. Here’s the evidence for the diagnosis. Our word, our discipline is very narrative rich. And you know, just to be able to sort of either get a prior authorization for service or to be able to continue service. And so we have a clinician burnout issue because of the administrative burden, the documentation burden.

00:22:36

Danny And, you know, so that’s and the tech just facilitates that. But I do think is exciting, you know, ambient genitive AI and ambient for documentation. Our little our slice of the pie has been carved out and I’m so excited. And, you know, so Microsoft has gone there’s some other startups out there that got Oracle’s working on its tool that will really shift the burden away from documentation.

00:23:04

Danny I think it’s going to be a game changer.

00:23:06

David Great gratitude to all of you folks, and thank you for participating. Thank you.

00:23:11

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