You’re in a crisis. You need some mental-help, fast, and it’s not on the way. It can be wherever you are in the form of mHealth.
Lets say your therapist’s office or Community Mental Health Center is where you live in Brooklyn, Queens or the Rockaways and you work in Manhattan or The Bronx. It can take you an hour or more to get to treatment from work when you include waiting for the two trains and the bus that get you there, effectively knocking you out of up to a half-day’s work for a daytime appointment.
Good therapists are busy folks, and you want the best help you can get from them. Your employer wants you on the job. Going to a session during normal business hours is preferable to late or weekend meetings, when the therapist’s mind can be on family, his own crisis of the moment, or ice cream.
Employers hire folks to do jobs for them, not go to therapy, so they can be less than supportive. How do you do minimize time off work to see the therapist for a truly effective session? mHealth is an answer, using technology to minimize travel time and get the treatment you need to do your best at that job and life in general.
Mobile clinical health will reach $4.6 Billion annually by 2014 according to The Medical News . A good portion of that may be mental health services offered over the phone and internet…I hope you’re getting some of that by reading this over the internet right now, free.
Currently the physical health market is way ahead of mental health and addictions, as is usually the case with technology. Health monitoring with remote devices for diabetes, cardiac conditions and other chronic illness has been around long enough to make mHealth a $1.5 Billion industry today. Sessions over the phone and via webcam on the internet are being funded by the government in rural areas like upstate New York. This is a new way of doing business for us.
Clients like mHealth because they can get in a session without losing work…employers like it for that reason, too. Therapists like mHealth because they don’t really need to go to the office…they can connect with the client anywhere. Insurance companies like mHealth because they can pay less for a session (trust me, they’ll figure out how).
Mental Health folks like assessments. These tools can measure improvement over a period of time. For example, if you answer ten or twelve questions rated on a scale of 1-5 for each question, you have statistics to measure whether all those co-pays, direct payments, and insurance payments are doing any good. If treatment’s not doing any good for you, it’s only reasonable to fix the problem, the focus of discussions, and the tools employed by the client to get better.
Doing that assessment over the phone, or logging into you personal-health website with the therapist takes a few minutes and pays off in recovery.
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