A NYC Telemental Health Clinic Uses mHealth to Gain New Insights Into Care
Soho MD, a Manhattan-based virtual care practice focusing on teletherapy and telepsychiatry, is using an mHealth wearable to track heart rate and breathing patterns from patients dealing with anxiety and depression.
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By - With the Coronavirus pandemic severely curtailing in-person care, a Manhattan-based mental health clinic is getting the most out of its virtual care platform. Now they’re complementing their telemental health services with an mHealth wearable that monitors patient anxiety.
Soho MD founders Jacques Jospitre, MD, and Edward Ratush, MD, say the move from brick and mortar to telehealth a few years back gave their patients a more fluid, patient-friendly means of accessing care. When you’re in the middle of New York City, access to care isn’t easy regardless of the restrictions caused by COVID-19.
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“This pandemic threw everyone into the telemedicine game,” says Ratush. “We’d been doing it for a while, and we saw that we had a very unique opportunity.”
Soho MD offers teletherapy and telepsychiatry care for anxiety, depression and ADHD, through both virtual visits and a text messaging platform (called TextTherapy) designed for those whose insurance doesn’t cover telehealth. The services are designed to give patients access to a care provider at a time and place that is more convenient and comfortable for them.
Recently, the practice – which uses DrChrono software – started using the Lief Smart Patch, an mHealth wearable that monitors heart rate variability and breathing patterns in real time to identify anxiety levels, even panic attacks. The data is streamed back in through the patient’s electronic health record to aid care providers in remote patient monitoring.
“We’re going to get a much richer experience of what they’re going through,” says Jospitre.
The service is especially helpful for providers who want to do more than look at and listen to a patient on a video screen. Wearable devices, such as patches, smartwatches, activity bands – even tattoos, bandages, smartglasses and sensor-embedded clothing – give providers the opportunity to collect and track biometric data.
“This patch lets us connect to their hearts,” Jospitre says. “That’s an interesting analogy.”
For Ratush and Jospitre, the key to treatment lies in understanding patient histories, and those histories are much more than the spoken word. Anxiety and depression can’t always be easily described, nor can their triggers or causes be identified by recounting past experiences.
So Soho MD’s providers are now prescribing a patch that’s worn during the daytime. The patch synchs with an mHealth app to transfer biological data back to the clinic, giving those providers an extra level of data when they meet with their patients.
“This gives us a biological anchor for the psychiatric work,” says Ratush. “There’s a sense of connectivity” with the patient’s daily life.
Jospitre and Ratush say they’re taking it slow and easy with this new tool, learning as they go along and understanding that there’s more to do than simply gather the data. They also want to look at other mHealth devices that track social interactions and gather other information, though there’s a danger in giving patients too much to wear and providers too much to measure.
“We need to learn what we can and can’t do with this very rich data set,” says Jospitre. “We don’t want to oversell or compromise. This has already been a big step for us.”
