Health System to Employ AI, Analytics to Improve Mental Health Access

February 07, 2022 - UCHealth, based in Aurora, Colorado, is partnering with HealthRhythms, a digital mental health startup, to offer an artificial intelligence-based digital platform to millions of mental health patients.

HealthRhythms' app uses smartphone sensors to passively measure behavior relevant to mental health through daily activity and periodic surveys, leveraging AI to examine an individual’s mental health status. The technology then uses that data to deliver personalized, timely interventions to improve mental health.

Additionally, this technology could assist in solving universal problems in patient monitoring and early detection by allowing providers to triage and treat patients across the risk continuum effectively.

By identifying and diagnosing behavioral health concerns in the early stages, HealthRhythms could improve patient outcomes, especially for those with chronic diseases.

The HealthRhythms platform leverages over 40 years of laboratory data and clinical research by HealthRhyms co-founders.

“Partnering with UCHealth is a significant milestone in our commitment to transforming mental health care,” HealthRhythms' CEO Paul Gilbert said in a press release.

“HealthRhythms is the only company fully addressing this problem through valid measurement, high fidelity prediction and a highly personalized digital intervention platform that can be scaled to hundreds of millions of patients.”

The current health landscape lacks access to high-quality and timely mental healthcare. To address this issue, HealthRhythms uses predictive analytics.

“Patients with complex medical conditions like heart disease commonly also have complex mental health challenges. It is impossible to appropriately treat these patients without addressing all of the issues contributing to their health,” said Richard Zane, MD, chief innovation officer at UCHealth and chair of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in the news release.

“The real breakthrough with HealthRhythms is that it allows all types of providers across all specialties to integrate behavioral health into their care without needing to be mental health experts.”

UCHealth's goal is to have HealthRhythms on the phone of every patient who consents to it systemwide, added Kimberly A. Muller, the executive director of CU Innovations, a strategic healthcare fund affiliated with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, in the news release.

“We recognize that mental health is, in fact, health," she said. "Addressing mental health is essential to everything we are looking to do for care integration. We believe HealthRhythms' data and insights will change the face of care.”

UCHealth, a nationally recognized academic health system with 12 hospitals and hundreds of clinic locations, aims to improve behavioral healthcare access throughout Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska.

Other provider organizations such as MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital are also looking into using AI capabilities to deliver accessible mental healthcare and tackle health barriers.

According to MIT and Mass General, mental health barriers can include figuring out when and where to seek help, finding a nearby provider who is taking patients, and obtaining financial resources and transportation to appointments.

To address health barriers the research team has been working for the past five years to create machine-learning algorithms that can assist in diagnosing and monitoring symptom changes in individuals with major depressive disorders.

Using smartphones and other wearable devices, the research team is gathering detailed data on participants’ temperature, heart rate, activity levels, socialization, personal assessment of depression, sleep patterns, and more.