Clinically Validated Vital Signs for Mental Health

Remote patient monitoring is everywhere in healthcare today.  We see that in our ever expanding list of remote patient monitoring companies.  It’s not a reach to say that healthcare and startup companies are working hard to monitor every piece of your health remotely.  Everyone sees the potential of having access to your health data in an ongoing basis in order to assess deterioration of your health or even recovery from a disease or surgery.  We all have technology in our pockets that can now share that data with whomever we want and sensors for collecting that data are getting better.

With all of this said, we’re still in the early days of this movement.  Much like I saw with interoperability, we’ve made great progress, but there’s so much left to be done.  This was highlighted clearly to me when I talked with Susan Solinsky, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer at Ellipsis Health.  Before talking with Solinsky, I noticed on their website that they said “Today, there is no objective and scalable measure for the severity of anxiety and depression.”  As I considered the hundreds of RPM companies, sensors, wearables, and behavioral health startup companies out there, I couldn’t think of anyone that was even working on the problem.  So, I was certainly intrigued to learn about Ellipsis Health’s efforts to create an objective clinical measure of anxiety and depression.

Check out our interview with Solinsky below to learn more, but it’s great to see how Ellipsis Health is using technology and your voice to create a clinically validated vital sign for your mental health.  Diabetics have a blood sugar level.  Heart patients can look at blood pressure.  What do behavioral health patients have?  Yes, there are a number of screeners you can do or a physical assessment by a trained professional, but they are often expensive, time consuming, and are often only accessible in a counselor’s office.

Ellipsis Health on the other hand uses the power of your voice to assess your mental health for things like anxiety and depression.  Check out all the research and published papers on their work in this space.  Unlike some of their competitors who only look at the acoustics of voice, Ellipsis Health’s natural language processing combined with acoustic models uses a short sample of natural speech to objectively assess a person’s mental health and provide clinical decision support to a healthcare professional.

What’s cool about Ellipsis Health is that it can be embedded in any healthcare application.  They aren’t trying to boil the ocean themselves, but can layer their solution on top of any other app.  It’s not hard to see how a telehealth company could integrate their assessment during a patient intake.  The same is true for all the new digital front door companies that are checking patients in for appointments.  Why not layer this mental health assessment on to the check-in process?  Insurance companies could include this in their portals to help their members get help if needed.  I could keep going, but you get the idea.

Check out our interview with Ellipsis Health below to learn more about their efforts to create clinically validated signs for mental health.

Learn more about Ellipsis Health: https://www.ellipsishealth.com/

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About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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