Over the past decade, demand for mental health services has risen significantly, with the number of adults receiving psychiatric care increasing by more than 12 percent since 2011, according to the National Alliance for Mental Illness. However, a shortage of mental health clinicians means many people are still not able to access the care they need.
Known as the Digital Clinic, the team's innovative hybrid care model expands patients' access to highly effective mental health care while significantly decreasing patient wait times and length of treatment. Additionally, the team's recent pilot study suggests that this model may yield post-treatment improvements in patients' symptoms of depression and anxiety that are comparable to, if not better than, traditional models of care.
Patients seen in this model have a weekly hour-long virtual visit with their clinician and are provided with digital support between visits. The Digital Clinic relies on the use of mindLAMP, an opensource smartphone app designed by Torous and colleagues at BIDMC.
and treated more than 150 patients in the Digital Clinic. Currently, the model employs an 8-week course of treatment and minimizes the need for a wait list. Patients are now seen by the Digital Clinic within two weeks of referral, far less than in the traditional care models in which wait times can exceed three months.
"These outcomes meet and exceed outcomes from longer-term treatment," said Torous, who added that recent meta-analyses of mainly mainstream, evidence-based treatments found remission rates of just over half for anxiety disorders and roughly one third for depression.
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