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Increasing Access to Behavioral Health Care During a Pandemic

April 23, 2020


Increasing Access to Behavioral Health Care During a Pandemic

The challenges brought by COVID-19 are far from just physical, the virus has placed a heavy mental burden on Americans as well. At Fabric our work to support COVID-19 goes beyond simply triaging patients. We’re also working diligently to provide our health system partners with the virtual tools they need to provide safe and efficient mental health support to their patients. 

Throughout my time on the clinical content and professional services teams, I have been fortunate to play a role in developing behavioral health solutions for our health system partners. It’s rewarding to see the immediate impact our solutions can have on a health system, provider, and most importantly on a patient level. Now, as a member of our clinical content team, I work directly with health systems and providers on the front lines to develop and enhance our clinical protocols to meet their evolving needs.

Here’s how Fabric is helping health systems across the country with their behavioral health solutions:

  • Evaluation and diagnosis: by using our intelligent interview (asynchronous) technology, providers can diagnose patients based on their responses to standard screening assessments. For example, a patient can fill out a standard PHQ-9 assessment, and get scored based on their responses.
  • Consultation: based on a patient’s responses and assessment done on the back end of the Fabric platform, a provider can see what risk-category a patient falls into to determine next steps in the patient’s care plan and eligibility for certain treatments. 
  • Continuing care: if a patient has an established relationship with a provider, care can be administered virtually for their behavioral health concerns.
    • With our Outpatient Video Visits product patients can easily schedule a visit through their health system. When it’s time for the video visit, the patient will be reminded to log on, fill out an assessment, and enter the “digital waiting room”. When the provider is ready, the visit will begin. 
  • Patient education: education and prevention is the first step to managing wellbeing. The work done behind the scenes by our clinical content team ensures patients have the most up-to-date resources and education they need during this difficult time. 

Tens of millions of Americans are diagnosed every year with behavioral health problems—anxiety, depression, PTSD, postpartum depression, etc. But as the pandemic wears on, the burden on mental health likely will too. The things that we previously would use to cope, like therapy or group meetings, aren’t possible because of social distancing. Since March 20, one of our health system partners has seen their behavioral health visits rise from a handful to over 2,000. Our health system partners are stepping up to the challenge and increasing access to behavioral health care, in a time when it is needed more than ever before.

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