Behind the Scenes: Brightside Health’s Digital Health Hub Foundation Award Win for Crisis Care

A proud moment for our team at this year’s HLTH conference was Brightside Health ’s selection as the The Digital Health Hub Foundation - Digital Health Awards Best in Class in the Mental and Behavioral Health category. There’s so much that went into that process, and I wanted to take a moment to describe the effort from our team, as well as what the judges saw in our nomination.

What Makes a Winning Program

First, about the Digital Health Hub Foundation Award: They search for health tech companies dramatically improving healthcare through the use of technology that present significant growth and traction in the marketplace. For the Mental and Behavioral Health award specifically, solutions submitted must improve access to care, have clinical validation and proven outcomes, and support privacy and security. Based on the criteria, we thought Crisis Care – a first-of-its-kind national telehealth program for treating individuals with elevated suicide risk – was a perfect fit for our submission.

Crisis Care was designed to fill pervasive gaps in care and save lives. It’s especially critical with the current state of the mental health crisis: 130 Americans die every day by suicide, and 12M people seriously consider taking their lives each year. People with mild-to-severe depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders often face challenges in accessing care, especially in getting appointments quickly.

Data shows that our model is effective. In a year since Crisis Care’s debut, we’ve been able to effectively treat hundreds of people who report not only suicidal ideation, but the increased risk of considering a plan to follow through. The average wait time is just one to three days (for in-person care, waitlists can be six months!), and it takes approximately six sessions for most individuals to graduate from the program. We’ve seen active and graduated members demonstrate notable declines in suicidal ideation frequency; PHQ-9 scores (an industry standard to measure depression); and GAD-7 scores (an industry standard to measure general anxiety disorder).?

Crisis Care is having a meaningful impact on the individuals enrolled and provides safety and efficacy for this population through the use of specific clinical protocols, rigorous oversight, and a well-structured program that is both high-tech and high touch. This is a vital complement to the Brightside platform, which provides high-quality psychiatric care across the full severity spectrum of mood and anxiety disorders. Our team has tirelessly worked to bring our Crisis Care offering to the marketplace, and I want to thank them for all their contributions as well as the judges for their recognition of these efforts. I also want to recognize the other companies who were nominated. There are so many great teams working to address mental illness needs, including Tiatros Inc. , Ria Health , and Bicycle Health .

What’s Next for Brightside Health And The Mental Health Industry

December 12 will mark one year since debuting Crisis Care. We know serving high-acuity and high-severity patients remains critical as suicide rates stay at an all-time high. As part of this, we’re doubling down on our mission to deliver life-saving care to all who need it and will be making Crisis Care available to Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries as part of our recent expansion. With this expansion, we’ll drive more coverage across the country, bringing Brightside Health’s total covered lives to well over 100 million. That equates to about one out of three Americans.

While awards are nice and our team sincerely appreciates the recognition, what fuels us is our desire to help more people have access to life-changing mental healthcare. Our team is a long way from done.

Written by Brad Kittredge, CEO and co-founder of Brightside Health

Brad Kittredge is the CEO and co-founder of Brightside Health. He has spent over a decade pioneering evidence-based and consumer-driven health care solutions, including building the Product teams at 23andMe and Lantern. Inspired by the challenges of a close family member with lifelong depression, Brad’s mission is to ensure that everyone has access to life-changing mental health care with measurably better outcomes. He holds MPH, MBA, and Psychology degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

Interested in learning more about how Brightside Health can help you offer life-saving mental health care, including solutions for those at elevated risk of suicide? Visit us at www.brightside.com/partners, or reach out directly at [email protected].