Photo: HIMSS TV
The healthcare industry has been learning about virtual mental health services for quite some time. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, provided a crash course in this care delivery mode. Rob Havasy, Managing Director, Personal Connected Health Alliance, and Jamey Edwards, CEO, Cloudbreak Health, recently met with Jonah Comstock, Editor-in-Chief, HIMSS Media, to discuss how the industry coped with the pandemic-induced spike in demand for virtual mental health services and what providers can expect moving forward.
Although demand soared during the pandemic, interest in virtual mental health services has been increasing for some time. “What most people don’t realize is that telepsychiatry and telemental health services were in pretty high demand, pre-COVID. And, what COVID really did was catalyze the adoption of those services,” Edwards said during a recent HIMSS TV interview conducted as part of a series on the virtual care paradigm.
The pandemic created “an increased demand for mental health services when the supply of psychiatrists wasn’t increasing. So digital health was one of the only ways to really drive more access and help solve what was a supply and demand imbalance,” Edwards added.
As a result, virtual mental health services became the norm and providers learned a variety of lessons that could help them effectively deliver virtual mental healthcare in the future. What follows is a snapshot from two industry experts about how the future of mental health services is shaping up in the digital realm.
Unfortunately, there is a digital divide, as many members of underserved populations “don’t have broadband access, or they don’t have a smartphone. … [So, we need to] make sure that we are promoting health equity, when it comes to things like mental health,” Edwards concluded.
To watch the entire interview with Havasy and Edwards and learn how mental health services will fit into the virtual care paradigm of tomorrow, visit HIMSS TV/Ontrak.
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