One in five Americans lives with a mental illness, and approximately 12 million people consider suicide annually. These numbers are even more staggering when factoring in access to care: there’s a growing shortage of mental health providers; emergency departments (EDs) are overrun with patients; and less than half of people with a mental illness are receiving timely treatment. As a result, EDs may be forced to admit patients for lack of better referral or follow-up care, leaving people and their providers wondering where to turn for high-quality, accessible, and affordable mental health care.
For all these reasons and more, Brightside Health – the telehealth company delivering life-saving mental health care to individuals with mild-to-severe clinical depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders – created Crisis Care.
What is Crisis Care?
Crisis Care is a first-of-its-kind national telehealth program for treating individuals with elevated suicide risk. Based on the clinically proven Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) framework, the program helps patients learn coping strategies to address and eliminate suicidal ideation, increase hopefulness, and reduce overall psychological pain and distress. Individuals considering suicide require timely access to specialized care and cannot wait weeks or months to be seen by a provider, which is why Crisis Care provides timely access to safe and effective treatment to those who typically exceed risk for outpatient treatment but fall short of requiring emergency services or immediate inpatient psychiatric admission.
Crisis Care builds on Brightside Health’s proven care model that combines proprietary AI, purpose-built technology, and a world-class clinician network to improve patient outcomes across the entire clinical spectrum, affordably and at scale. In particular, PrecisionRx, the company’s AI-enabled clinical decision support tool, analyzes over 100 data points on an individual patient to then surface to clinicians the treatment likely to be most effective and acceptable for that patient. Results show a 70% response rate to the first treatment cycle, as opposed to industry standard 35% effect sizes.
Crisis Care’s Impact: By the Numbers
Crisis Care officially launched one year ago, and the need for this kind of program remains clear. A recent study in Healthcare looked at the feasibility and effectiveness of Crisis Care as a scalable suicide-specific treatment model. Notable results include:
- All patients, on average, experienced declines in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, suicidal ideation frequency, and suicide-specific risk factors.
- Patients were offered appointments within 24-72 hours. On average, patients’ initial evaluations were held within 4 days.
- 80% of patients who met graduation criteria did so within 8 sessions
- Nearly 90% of graduating patients stepped-down and remained engaged in ongoing mental health care at Brightside Health.
These results support the use of telehealth outpatient programs like Crisis Care as an effective solution to addressing key access gaps and expediting care connection for vulnerable populations at risk of suicide.
Crisis Care has also received notable accolades in 2023, including the Digital Health Hub Foundation’s Digital Health Award for Best In Class in the Mental and Behavioral Health category and Product of the Year in the Business Intelligence Group’s BIG Awards for Business. These reinforce the industry necessity and importance of telehealth-based suicide prevention and intervention. Brightside Health will continue to invest in Crisis Care and share its impact in 2024 and beyond.
What’s Next: Mental Healthcare for All
Brightside Health has always been committed to serving vulnerable populations and continues to make significant steps to ensure high-quality mental healthcare is accessible and affordable. For example, the company recently expanded its services, including Crisis Care, to Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries. This is incredibly important as one in four Medicare beneficiaries is living with mental illness (yet only 40-50% receive treatment), and Medicaid is the single largest payer for mental health services in the U.S., covering 83 million individuals as of August 2023.
It’s clear there’s more work to do – as an organization and as an industry – to ensure high-risk individuals have the resources they need. Brightside Health will continue to expand its life-saving services, including Crisis Care, to everyone who needs it.
About the Author
Mimi Winsberg, MD, is a Stanford-trained psychiatrist who brings 30 years of clinical experience to her role at Brightside Health, which delivers life-changing mental health care to people with mild to severe clinical depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. As Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder, she leads Brightside’s psychiatry and therapy clinical programs, with a focus on optimizing engagement and outcomes in individuals with mental health conditions across the range of severity, including those with suicidal ideation.