Building For Tomorrow
Not a single company has truly scaled in mental health.
Ultimately, that’s a problem that leads to extremely poor outcomes for patients.
Last month, I spoke at the Tech Tour Growth Health event in Lausanne, Switzerland on the challenges facing mental health innovators trying to scale. Care delivery companies have scaled, both on the hospital side as well as on the tele-psychiatry side.
Negative patient outcomes result from not being able to scale. Don’t believe me? Read on below.
Scaling Will Help Patients
The challenges inherent in scaling mental health care can often result in poor patient outcomes. One question I’ve posed to countless colleagues in the field is: why don’t we have a gold-standard hospital for mental health, similar to MD Anderson for cancer?
Take the Acadia Healthcare scandal, for example. Driven by the upwards demand for mental health care, Acadia has experienced significant growth as one of the largest hospital chains in the U.S.
But instead of receiving the care they needed, patients were detained against their will, often without medical necessity. In many cases, patients who sought routine care were held under laws meant for those who posed an imminent threat to themselves or others. Acadia patients were held until their insurance coverage ran out.
While there’s no shortage of demand for mental health solutions, facilities like Acadia are not close to providing a reasonable solution to the crisis. The current system fails to align patient care with evidence-based approaches that help patients.
The solution to this issue lies in closing the evidence gap.
First we have to unlock the potential of real-world evidence. This involves transforming billions of unstructured patient data points into a structured and comprehensive database. This, in turn, will guide the development of treatment plans tailored to individual patient needs.
This data-driven, patient-centered approach, also known as precision psychiatry, has the potential to revolutionize mental health care. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, precision care matches treatments with the specific needs and profiles of individual patients. This, in turn, vastly improves outcomes.
Scaling this kind of care requires more than ambition—it requires innovation.
At Holmusk, we are charting a path forward by leveraging real-world data to close the evidence gap, creating systems that are not only scalable but also precisely tailored to each patient. We’re working towards a future where mental health care is as effective and trusted as the best cancer treatments.
Transforming Data into Insight
In the current clinical environment, patient-level data is often completely unstructured in clinical notes. Even if these notes are entered into an EHR, it’s extremely difficult to extract usable data from them at scale, even if they can provide a window into disease progression.
In a peer-reviewed paper published in the Natural Language Processing Journal, researchers used over 185,000 unique clinical notes from nearly 430,000 patients in Holmusk’s NeuroBlu platform.
They were able to use a transformer architecture-based NLP model to take these shorthand notes and capture clinical features of patients experiencing major depressive disorder (MDD).
This is a huge leap in being able to extract symptomatic data and disease progression for MDD. It’s all being made possible by Holmusk.
“Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.”
Scaling and growth in mental health will only come from the momentum generated by solving the evidence gap. I’m proud to be part of that solution at Holmusk.