Amwell CEO Ido Schoenberg, MD, on the location-driven nature of healthcare.

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Amwell Launches Comprehensive Behavioral Health Program

It’s officially #MentalHealthAwarenessMonth, making it a great time to show some genuine support to your friends and colleagues, and an opportune moment for virtual care providers like Amwell to launch behavioral health solutions.

Amwell recently debuted the Amwell Comprehensive Behavioral Health Program, combining the digital cognitive behavioral therapy programs of SilverCloud Health (acquired last year) with virtual care provided by psychiatrists from Amwell Medical Group.

• Members undergo individual evaluations before selecting either self-guided or coach-supported care, and can then be referred to virtual therapy and psychiatry as needed.

• The solution can be tailored to meet specific population needs, enabling payors and providers to deliver personalized experiences for various severities and care delivery preferences.

The new program extends Amwell’s growing suite of behavioral health tools, which includes Amwell Psychiatric Care for acute psychiatric needs and ED clinical support, as well as the SilverCloud Health Family Support Suite to help new parents and their children manage mental health concerns.

• Behavioral health is one of healthcare’s most capacity-strained areas, and the pandemic has only exacerbated the problem.

• Amwell cites research that 60% of US counties don’t have a single psychiatrist, and that 41% of adults have felt anxious or depressed during the pandemic.

The Takeaway
Amwell is clearly committed to quickly scaling its virtual behavioral health portfolio, which is a pretty natural direction to pursue given the huge need and telehealth’s ability to help address it. Behavioral health might also be one of the only clinical areas where telehealth represents a truly preferred substitute to in-person care, and Amwell’s recent investment in the area should go a long way toward making its services durable as patients begin returning to in-person care.

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The Wire

• Cerebral Replaces CEO: Telemedicine startup Cerebral voted to oust CEO Kyle Robertson amid increased federal scrutiny over its prescribing practices. As part of its image makeover, Cerebral announced that its former chief medical officer Dr. David Mou will take over as CEO, and that it will stop prescribing nearly all controlled substances. To add to the drama, the Wall Street Journal reported that Robertson hadn’t agreed to resign, and instead issued a memo calling the board’s move to replace him illegal, only to have his access to the company’s Slack messaging system abruptly revoked.

• Evolution of Care: CarePort, powered by WellSky, released its Evolution of Care report that examined data from over 1k hospitals and 130k post-acute care providers to reveal the pandemic’s impact on care coordination (spoiler alert, it wasn’t good). CarePort found a 33% increase in patient referrals to home health compared to 2019, but a 15% reduction in home health acceptance, and another 10% decline in skilled nursing facility referrals. On top of that, the data shows that patients discharged to SNFs and home health care are now more acute than in 2019, with an 11% higher average comorbidity score.

• Transcarent Expansion: Employer healthcare platform Transcarent is expanding into the behavioral health arena with a new solution that will let members chat with a doctor in under a minute and access therapy appointments in less than three days. The solution is integrated directly into provider scheduling systems to streamline appointment setting, allowing Transcarent to slash the 21-day average wait time for a mental health appointment that it says is a central concern for its employer clients.

• Behavioral “Tipping Point”: If you still haven’t had enough behavioral health news this week then you’re in luck, because a new ORCHA report found that a behavioral health “tipping point” has been reached as UK residents now prefer mHealth apps to antidepressants. After surveying 2k adults in the UK, 55% of 18-24 year-olds would opt for a mental health app over medication, while 53% would even prefer an app over one-on-one tele-therapy. The report breaks down key reasons why the apps have been gaining an edge (convenience, immediacy, confidentiality), and most of the takeaways are just as relevant outside of the UK.

• Tia Fertility: Women’s health startup Tia is extending its “whole woman, whole life” care model to fertility services with a new offering that includes unbiased counseling, prevention-focused care, and mental healthcare. The new fertility services will serve as a core pillar of Tia’s comprehensive women’s health support, designed to replace transactional care with a relationship-based model that integrates primary care, gynecology, and wellness.

• Older Patient Telehealth: One third of adults over the age of 50 are very interested in utilizing telehealth services in the future, according to an AARP poll of 1.1k older Americans. The survey found that 51% of respondents used telemedicine within the past two years, but 32% worry the quality is inferior to in-person care. These types of surveys make it appear likely that telehealth will remain an important tool in the healthcare delivery tool kit for older patients, despite their lower overall telehealth utilization compared to younger demographics.

• Walmart Health Virtual Care: Telehealth provider MeMD is changing its name to Walmart Health Virtual Care nearly one year after it was originally acquired, signaling that its integration into the retail giant’s Walmart Health arm is nearing completion. Walmart Health Virtual Care provides large enterprises with telehealth services including primary care and behavioral healthcare, complementing brick-and-mortar Walmart Health centers where patients can access in-person treatment. Walmart Health Virtual Care will first be available through the recently-announced Florida Walmart Health centers before expanding nationwide over the following months.

• Continual Learning Models: A Nature article outlined a new continual learning framework for training predictive models that addresses their lower performance when applied to external patient cohorts. Researchers at UCSD validated the model in the context of sepsis prediction using data from 104k patients across four health systems, finding that it maintained higher predictive performance than a traditional baseline transfer learning approach. While we won’t pretend to know exactly why “joint elastic weight consolidation” makes this framework superior to established methods, it received a lot of attention on digital health social media for its potential to make predictive models more generalizable across institutions.

• ThoroughCare Funding: ThoroughCare closed a $3M growth investment to accelerate the development of its platform that enables physicians to improve care coordination while simplifying value-based reimbursement programs. The SaaS platform is paired with a mobile application to help physician groups and health centers identify the next best actions at critical moments.

• Hospital Job Vacancies: A recent survey commissioned by AKASA found that 57% of US health systems have over 100 job openings, highlighting how the staffing shortage is extending well beyond just clinical staff. Nearly 26% of the 411 health execs surveyed said that their organization needed to hire more than 20 people to adequately staff their revenue cycle department, an issue that the report recommends addressing by relaxing job requirements to attract motivated applicants with less experience, as well as implementing automation tools to do more with fewer employees.