In this episode of Healthcare Americana, we welcome John Cray, the Chief Technology Officer at Mental Health Technologies, a company at the forefront of revolutionizing mental health testing and screening. Host Christopher Habig delves into the world of mental health, where headlines often feature extreme cases or celebrity admissions, shedding light on an issue that affects countless lives. They explore the impact of these headlines and how they have, in some ways, made discussions about mental health more accessible and normalized.

The conversation goes deeper as John Cray discusses the challenges in mental health screening and the need for a more comprehensive approach. He shares insights into how Mental Health Technologies is changing the game by providing automated testing solutions that not only offer convenience to patients but also empower physicians with actionable data. Discover the importance of early detection, the frequency of mental health screening, and how technology can strengthen the physician-patient relationship.

Join us for a thought-provoking episode that touches on critical issues in healthcare and the innovative solutions that are making a difference in mental health treatment and care.

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[INTRODUCTION]

[EPISODE]

Anybody who's listened to this podcast over the last few years, understands my opinion about the mental health crisis in America, specifically, how it really isn't being addressed. Also, the role that primary care physicians, specifically, those who work with Freedom Healthworks in the direct primary care world have an ability to start making impact in people's lives when it comes to mental health and mental illnesses. Catching conditions before they become really bad and catching conditions before people become really a threat to themselves and to society on the far end of the spectrum. But there's so many other everyday mental health things, it just kind of weigh on our mind. It's almost like a death by a thousand cuts in a sort of sense.

Please welcome to our show, John Cray, the Chief Technology Officer at Mental Health Technologies, a firm that is really revolutionizing mental health testing, and screening, and making it more accessible so that everyday Americans can get the care and the treatment that they need, and they deserve. John, welcome to our show. Welcome to Healthcare Americana.

Give us an idea of what used to happen as far as screening and trying to figure out where people landed as far as what is going on between their ears. And then, juxtapose that with what you're working on at Mental Health Technologies.

Now, at least, there's some regulatory changes that at least require some level of questioning about your mental state, at least, say, once a year. But what we're really finding is that that really isn't enough. Like if someone asks a couple of basic depression questions on your annual physical, which is a PHQ-2, basically. You're being asked that kind of quickly right in the doctor's office, they're trying to move on to other things. Maybe it's the nurse asking it, they really don't ask any follow up questions, or dive any deeper. So it becomes this sort of brusque, pressured thing, and patients maybe don't respond as honestly, and there's no time really taken to figure out what's really going on with the patient. I think that's still a big challenge, and that's a challenge that we're directly trying to address.

But when we talk about these questionnaires, these PHQs, and this has to be pretty obvious that these tests are ripe for false answers, for the people being just kind of holding something back, and not being completely honest, and becoming completely forthcoming. Has that been your experience when you're trying to create something else, create a better assessment tool, where you bring in the ability to actually get honest answers from patients?

The answers that the patient gives seem to depend on whether they're able to think about the question before they answer. One of the things we found, and one of the things we do is we send our questionnaires out to patients well in advance of their appointments. We know about an appointment, we might get it from the EMR, EHR system at the clinic, that triggers us to run some rules to figure out whether the patient should receive mental health tests more than one perhaps, depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, alcohol dependency, drug dependency, pain levels. It could be anything. It depends on what the appointment is about and what the patient's diagnosis is.

But once we figure out what to test, and how to test, then it becomes giving it to them where they have time, they're in a private setting, they might get it on their cell phone at home. They can take the time to answer honestly. Chris, I want to say one other thing, because you mentioned something kind of key, right when you're leading up to this. That was about getting compensated. Doctor's practice is getting compensated for this. It turns out, if you do it right, mental health tests are billable. They're actually very billable. You can't do them every day, or every week, insurers won't go that far. But you can do them periodically, and you can bill reasonably often for them.

If you complement your practice with these tests, you can actually do a couple of things. Number one, you can increase your billing to insurers based on the test themselves. But you can also prove certain metrics, which might reduce your insurance rates over time. It's one of those things where if the insurers know that you're regularly checking in on your patients in a number of these key metric areas, and mental health is one of them, you can reduce your rates. So there's actually direct financial benefits for this as well.

We've run some metrics recently, and we found that about 20% or so of the test we do for depression indicates suicidality, which is a stunning number one, out of five. That's just something we see every single day. If you see that, then testing more often is more important. If the patient goes into some kind of treatment, if it's a directly a treatment for mental health through some kind of drug regimen, or through some of the more advanced technologies that exist now for improving mental health, then checking them a lot more regularly to see whether they're progressing is – we’re finding is absolutely key.

That's why I'm kind of thinking like, can Mental Health Technologies, your company here, is that creating a stronger relationship between physicians and patients, where they can stay more in tune with one another? And that physician can be a resource to that patient, if and when those cycles happen, or that stress spikes, or even on the good days, and the patient could say, "Hey, doc. I feel great today, this is amazing"?

[BREAK]

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

It could be that if they're experiencing a lot of depression, there might be childhood trauma, or something else that you want to probe in on. So there could be some situations that if you're under a lot of pain, you might want to also test for anxiety, for example. There are lots of tests that make sense together. There's all those rules. When we run those rules, our engine then just basically says, "Okay. Here are the tests we need to send out." We send them out to the patient in the form of a text message, an email, whatever the appropriate communication vehicle is for that patient. They get it on their mobile phone, let's say, click on the link, take the test, usually takes a few minutes.

Even answering the questions honestly, taking your time, no more than three, four, five minutes at the most. You submit your answers, they come back into our system. We run basically the diagnostic on the test results, come up with what the test really means. Then we send that back into the EHR, so it's right in front of the person, the provider when they're meeting with the patient. That's really the end-to-end workflow.

Then based on that, we can do other things. Let's say the patient says, they're suicidal, we can redirect them to a web page, the 988 Suicide Hotline webpage, for example, and get them the help they might need, or at least some way of getting that help right away. Another thing we can do is, if they say they're above a certain level of depression, or whatever tests you're measuring, we can redirect, or we can send out a notification to someone so that they're informed. And maybe they can bring in a mental health person into the equation for that patient, so we can refer as well. There's a lot of actionable stuff that kind of happens on the back of the testing as well.

One thing that was interesting when I was researching this episode, you're testing your technology also identify addictions, dependencies.

Then again, they can refer, they can help the patient with inpatient, or outpatient treatment options, or whatever they decide to do, and that can all be automated. To your point about taking the burden off of the physician, we don't want to give them more work to do. We actually want to give them more information, but provide them options to make sure they don't have to do everything for the patient themselves. I think that's really the fundamental key to it.

Then my mom, as she got older, develop dementia. It was, again, one of those things where we didn't know in advance, it was happening. She was maybe a little forgetful, or quicker to anger, or whatever it might be. But we just thought it was just, basically, she's tired or whatever. If we would have been able to see the results of better testing, it honestly would have made a much bigger difference for us in terms of getting her the help she needed as she progressed.

So yes, personally, I was – when I saw the opportunity to get involved in hands-on helping patients with these kinds of conditions, I was all over it. It's amazing to get up in the morning and feel like you're doing something good for people in the world, as you know.

We'll look for a certain size, and we'll look for a certain geography, and then we'll kind of go after it. Again, with the combination of primary care, and behavioral health, all within the same area, and kind of link the two things together. We've seen – we're starting to propagate that across the country. We're testing patients in maybe 12, or 14 states now in the US, and we're rapidly expanding. We've grown four times our size in the last year. It's an extremely important thing to do. We're seeing people really taking it up, and using it effectively, so it's been great.

[OUTRO]

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