Unifying Behavioral and Physical Health: eCareMD Powers Real-Time Monitoring for Better Mental Health Outcomes

Client Overview

The client is a Behavioral health practice serving approximately 180 patients diagnosed with mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, from which many also have chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. The current workflow of the client's business has lacked integrated tools for the improvement of both physical and mental health. While working with 4 physicians and 8 nursing staff, the client is facing several business challenges in order to manage patients with mental health conditions and serious chronic conditions.

Business Challenges

1. Inability to Monitor Physical Health Indicators Impacting Mental Wellness

Patients' symptoms like poor blood sugar or blood pressure control have also affected patients' mental health, causing of in many cases, the lack of patients' real-time vital data, contributing to a gap within the patient-provider encounter.

2. Medication Non-Adherence Across Both Domains

The large patient population from the client's practice has an inconsistency in taking prescribed medications for both mental and physical conditions, leading to irregularities in patients' health, which cause preventable health crises.

3. Poor Control of Chronic Illness Among Psychiatric Patients

The patient with a mental health diagnosis shows 50% more poor control of their chronic condition, such as fluctuations in sugar level, resulting in low patient awareness and low quality of patient outcomes.

4. Lack of Tools for Integrated Monitoring

Without any tools, the staff has failed to track both mental and physical health condition monitoring, the unstructured workflows are limiting the quality of care delivery, and creating difficulty in connecting patients.

Solution

To overcome these business challenges, the client interacts with Medarch Inc., where Medarch’s business analyst team provides a live demo of the care coordination software “eCareMD” RPM platform with customized support for behavioral health integration. This platform allows providers to monitor patients in real time.

Solution Highlighted

Some of the Key solutions were implemented as below;

1. Connected Device-Based Physical Health Monitoring

Patients were provided medical devices such as BP monitors, glucometers, and weight scales. These devices transform readings directly to the care team, enabling continuous insights into the patient's physical health status without relying on the patient’s daily follow-ups. This allows providers to keep a continuous check on the patient’s vital data and make timely interventions accordingly.

2. Daily Mood Tracking and Behavioral Assessments

In eCareMD, Providers can assign an assessment via sms and email for mood tracking and behavioral activities, which collects patients' responses and gives the provider immediate insights in a graphical form. This is used to find patterns in physical and mental health and identify psychological inconsistencies.

3. Medication Adherence Insights via Smart Reminders & Logging

The eCaremd provides patients with automated medication reminders and tracks patients’ medication adherence via progress tracking. The proactive features like Reminders, Alert generation system for increased risk, helped patients to keep away from critical situations and increased awareness within patients.



4. Integrated AI-enabled Clinical Dashboard for Whole-Person Monitoring

On eCareMD, the providers access a centralized AI-enabled RPM dashboard, which has strategic algorithms to figure out critical situations from patients' data and show them on the dashboard accordingly. It involves fluctuation in patients' vitals, missing medications, patients’ response patterns, and auto suggestions for care planning, which fill the physical and mental health gap. It flagged at-risk patients proactively and recommended outreach strategies.

Value Delivered

1. 45% Improvement in Chronic Disease Control

Seamless health tracking, along with behavioral monitoring, resulted in improvement in patient outcomes for patients managing conditions like diabetes and hypertension. This led to improve overall client’s 45% improvement in chronic diseases.

2. Increased Medication Adherence by 50%

The automated reminders of eCareMD and care providers' timely follow-ups helped patients to stay consistent with their prescribed medications for both physical and mental health.

3. Improved Care Coordination and Engagement

The client staff are delivering improved, quality care with data-driven insights that help to make necessary interventions, improving overall patient satisfaction and trust.

4. Reduction in Behavioral Health Crises Linked to Physical Triggers

By addressing the physical health issues early, the practice managed mental health events, reducing health crises and emergencies.