Adoption of Digital Health Technologies in the Practice of Behavioral Health

This is the title of a paper published today with co-authors Suepattra May, Caroline Huber, Meaghan Roach, Wade Aubry, Darius Lakdawalla, John Kane, and Felicia Forma. The subtitle is “Qualitative Case Study of Glucose Monitoring Technology“. The abstract is below. Background: Evaluation of patients with serious mental illness (SMI) relies largely on patient or caregiver…

How can we improve mental health services provided by employers?

At the American Psychiatric Association meeting last week, the APAM Center provided some suggestions. AJMC reports that their 5 policy recommendations include: Create action plan to insure network adequacy. “Employers can start by expanding services at the inpatient and outpatient levels, and engaging regional and national organizations to add providers, including specialty providers. They can…

Economics of mental health

Pharmafile has an interesting article on the “Economics of Mental Health”.  The article has a number of interesting statistics: The cost: “Mental health issues have been estimated to cost the world economy $2.5 trillion each year. To put that into perspective, the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product (GDP) was $2.6 trillion in 2017.” Costs extend…

Modelling medication adherence patterns for patients with serious mental and physical illnesses

Please check out my recent paper titled “Medication Adherence Patterns Among Patients with Multiple Serious Mental and Physical Illnesses” with co-authors Joanna P. MacEwan, Alison R. Silverstein, Darius N. Lakdawalla, Ainslie Hatch and Felicia M. Forma in Advances in Health.   This study is unique because it looks at medication adherence patterns among patients with…

Can long acting injectables save money?

Patients with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia often struggle with medication adherence, due to lack of insight into their disease, medication side effects, forgetfulness, and a variety of other factors.  One solution to this problem is to use long-acting injectables or LAIs.  Whereas most antipsychotics are oral medications, LAIs are typically injectables that you need to…

Coordinating Federal Efforts for Patients with Serious Mental Illness

Following up a December 2014 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, testimony last week Linda T. Kohn, Director of Health Care at the GAO describes how fragmented the federal government provides very fragmented support services care for individuals with serious mental illness.  Coordinate across agencies is lacking and few agencies have conducted evaluations of their programs. Agencies identified 112 federal programs…