Kaiser Permanente is offering its members free access to Ginger's on-demand emotional support coaching app as part of its growing portfolio of digital self-care tools.
With Ginger, Kaiser Permanente members across the organization's entire geographic footprint can text one-on-one with emotional support coaches that provide help with common challenges such as managing stress or getting better sleep at no cost and with no referral or appointment needed.
Kaiser Permanente currently serves 12.6 million members in eight states and the District of Columbia.
Last fall, Ginger merged with Headspace, creating a $3 billion mental health company. By combining Ginger's teletherapy services with Headspace's meditation and mindfulness app, the company, now called Headspace Health, has a combined reach to 100 million consumers, according to the company.
Kaiser Permanente has been building out a digital mental health and wellness ecosystem of clinical and nonclinical services, tools and resources. In 2020, Kaiser Permanente added the first two apps to its digital self-care portfolio: Calm, a leading tool for mindfulness meditation, and myStrength, designed to help people improve well-being and enhance sleep or mood.
Kaiser Permanente physicians and therapists also have the ability to refer their patients to these and other evidenced-based mental health and wellness apps through the organization’s electronic health record system, said Don Mordecai, M.D., psychiatrist and national leader for mental health and wellness at Kaiser Permanente.
"We've taken a sort of human-centered design approach to what kind of tools we want to bring forward for our members. We have more clinically oriented tools and then we have tools that our members can go on to KP.org and just download for themselves and use," Mordecai said in an interview.
He added, "We feel this is the next step in the evolution of our digital tools."
Digital health tools like Ginger expand members' and patients' access to mental health hygiene resources and help complement clinical care, he noted.
"We have lots of patients who don't have clinical mental health disorders. They don't have major depression. They don't have a panic disorder, but they have issues that are making it difficult to manage their lives. They might be stressed or they might have sleep problems or relationship problems. So one of our ideas was to offer those people something and not just wait until they have a clinical condition," Mordecai said.
"The Ginger offering sits between our self-care offerings and our clinical care, providing personalized text-based support from trained Ginger coaches to our members in the moment when they need it the most, anytime day or night," he noted.
Making evidence-based mental health and wellness apps widely available is part of Kaiser Permanente’s ongoing commitment to addressing the mental health and wellness needs of its members and communities, executives said. Kaiser Permanente offers mental health care focused on early intervention, personalized treatment, patient empowerment and support along with the latest innovations in care delivery, including virtual care.
Kaiser Permanente aims to build an ecosystem of "high-quality apps" for adults, Mordecai said. "We're in the process of working on bringing forward a similar set of apps for teenagers and young adults because we think that's a pretty distinct group in terms of the way that they want to interact with these kinds of tools. Maybe, a few years in the future, we'd really like to develop substance use disorder apps as well. That would round out what we think would be a sort of complete set of these apps to complement the more traditional clinical care systems that we have," he said.
In early 2022, a survey conducted on behalf of the American Psychological Association found that a large percentage of Americans reported high stress levels due to the financial impacts from inflation, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and global uncertainty. Mental health resources like the Ginger app, used on a self-guided basis or as a complement to clinical support, can help people build resilience, set goals and take meaningful steps toward improving mental health and wellness, according to the organizations.
Kaiser Permanente members can text with a coach using the Ginger app for 90 days per year. After the 90 days, members can continue to access the other services available on the Ginger app for the remainder of the year at no cost.
As the organization builds out its portfolio of self-care digital tools, it has learned lessons about how best to engage members.
"Anybody might download these apps and then it sits on their phone. It doesn't necessarily get a lot of use. So our first effort was to say, 'OK, we're gonna put these out there, how do we do that in a way that it gets people to engage with them more?'" Mordecai said. "We put out the Calm app and myStrength and we made those available at no cost to our members. We saw much greater uptake and engagement than you typically would out in the 'digital wild,' so to speak, and we think that was because of a connection with a trusted brand like Kaiser Permanente."
He added, "The literature tells us another aspect of what will help people engage with these tools and make them a little more sticky is if there's actually a human being on the other end to interact with and they're not just standalone tools. And that's where Ginger's coaching comes in. We think that's a pretty compelling proposition for our members who might have stress issues, they might have relationship issues or the kind of things that aren't really clinical necessarily, but where people could really use a little help, basically from somebody who's trained to assist them."
Kaiser Permanente members can use the Ginger app to discuss goals, share challenges and create an action plan with their coach and get personalized, interactive skill-building tools from a library of more than 200 clinically validated activities and resources.
“Coaching has proven benefits to a wide variety of people who are faced with everything from day-to-day sleep struggles to more complex family, work, or relationship challenges,” said Dana Udall, Ph.D., chief clinical officer at Headspace Health, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to now offer high-quality, on-demand coaching to the Kaiser Permanente member community.”
Anyone can access the range of mental health and wellness resources Kaiser Permanente offers on kp.org, including articles, videos, and exercises, now also available in Spanish, according to the organization.