Brigham and Women's Uses Telehealth to ID, Treat Provider Stress

Brigham and Women’s Hospital is using a telehealth platform in a trial program aimed at identifying and treating stress and burnout in healthcare professionals.

The Boston-hospital hospital launched the program in August with Rose, a Baltimore-based mHealth company launched out of Johns Hopkins. During the program, emergency care providers will receive access to the connected health platform to answer daily questionnaires and post free-response entries in an online journal.

AI and NLP tools on the back end of the platform analyze those entries to detect early signs of depression, anxiety, trauma and other behavioral health concerns. They also provide access to personalized resources for coping.

The program was spurred by a surge in stress and burnout among healthcare providers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

Health systems and hospitals across the country have been launching a wide range of connected health programs aimed at identifying care providers struggling with stress and providing treatment and coping tools. They include virtual counseling sessions, mHealth apps and even wearables that can detect heightened levels of anxiety.

“With more than 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US, many hospitals are overloaded with patients with no end in sight,” Kavi Misri, Rose’s founder and CEO, said in a press release. “The toll this pandemic has taken on the mental and emotional health of front-line workers cannot be overlooked. They are experiencing an unprecedented number of patients, cases, deaths, and risks to their own health, all of which exacts a heavy toll on their mental state. We simply can’t ignore this emerging crisis that threatens the mental health and stability of our essential workers – they need support.”

Rose was selected for the pilot out of roughly 80 telehealth and mHealth submissions to Catalyst @ Health 2.0. The project “develops and implements programs for piloting and commercializing health care technology, facilitated the pilot program selection process, which was part of its Rapid Response Open Calls initiative to connect health care providers to the digital health community in response to the pandemic.”

“Rather than fragmented tools and programs aiming to ‘treat burnout,’ we need to better identify and tackle system-wide factors that lead to burnout, while promoting a healthy workplace for our healthcare workers,” John Shivdat, chairman and medical director of HCA Coliseum Health System in Georgia and an advisor to Rose, said in the press release.