The COVID-19 crisis shed light on the immense pressure faced by the mental health support system for the younger U.S. population. Parents with children grappling with intricate psychological and behavioral challenges have resorted to extreme steps to secure treatment for them. Christopher Booker of PBS News delves into this issue in a segment titled, “Early Warnings: America’s Youth Mental Health Crisis.”
Even as more people flock to therapy, U.S. mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics. Suicide rates have risen by about 30% since 2000. Almost a third of U.S. adults now report symptoms of either depression or anxiety, roughly three times as many as in 2019, and about one in 25 adults has a serious mental illness like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. As of late 2022, just 31% of U.S. adults considered their mental health “excellent,” down from 43% two decades earlier.
Despite high adoption rates of health IT, there is still a clear disconnect in how health data is shared between organizations, making clear the need for a data integration platform.
Cultural change can be the hardest part of digital transformation in healthcare. To successfully drive this change, healthcare leaders need to have clarity of purpose, empower their people through ongoing training and education, and adopt more agile ways of working for continuous improvement.
The next frontier in revolutionizing healthcare will be to use patient data for analytical insights. Right now, the data analysis phase is largely separate from data collection itself. For example, medical technology might alert an irregularity in a vital sign, but the healthcare provider needs to take one step further to understand the health issue. Going forward, AI will likely help to augment human intervention by interpreting patient data remotely and in real-time, thereby improving healthcare provider response times.
Integrating primary and behavioral health care allows providers to improve health and reduce the need for additional health care.
With the rise of value-based models, we are entering a new phase in health care in which our methods for preventing and treating chronic disease are likely to shift significantly. The hope is that this shift will not only reduce healthcare costs, but it will also strengthen relationships between patients and their doctors. The direct cost of care is largely dependent on payers who will need to provide financial incentives for pay-for-performance models.
Interoperability is a complex and challenging thing for the healthcare industry today. Different information systems, devices, and applications can access, exchange, integrate, and utilize the data beyond the boundaries to optimize global health needs.
Our current healthcare system was built around data silos that prevent collaboration, with trillions of dollars poured into disease treatment instead of prevention each year. Luckily, the rise of health tech has spurred a new generation of leaders looking to tackle the legacy industry and bring better relationships and, ultimately, better patient outcomes to the forefront.
