LAS VEGAS—A year ago at HLTH, Highmark and Spring Health announced a partnership that aimed to boost access to behavioral health care.
Now, the Pittsburgh-based insurer is offering the first look at how the program is working for patients. In data released Monday at the conference, Highmark said members with moderate to severe symptoms of depression reached remission three times faster than the national average.
For those who connected to the Mental Well-Being program, the average time it took for them to reach remission was 32.6 days for depression and 42 days for anxiety, compared to a national average of three to six months.
In addition, Highmark found that 80% of members who connected with the platform were doing so for the first time in at least 18 months. Tony Farah, M.D., chief medical and clinical transformation officer at Highmark, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview that it can take some patients a decade to seek out treatment for behavioral health, and it's common for these patients to get lost in the shuffle of follow-up visits.
The Mental Well-Being program is part of Highmark's broader Living Health strategy, which touches on all facets of a patient's health journey.
"Our approach is whole-person health, in which mental health is on par with social and physical health," Farah said.
Beyond the remission stats, Highmark found that the behavioral health program connected people to appointments within five days, averaging 1.3 days. Nationally, the average wait time for an in-person visit is 67 days, with waits for a telepsychiatry visit averaging 43 days.
This plays a role in the success that the program has seen in crisis intervention. Farah said that through the Mental Well-Being platform, Highmark was able to identify and intervene for "a couple thousand" patients who reported they were planning to harm themselves.
Because these members engaged proactively with the platform, the clinical team was able to provide immediate assistance to intervene before the patient attempted self-harm or suicide.
"This is literally life and death," Farah said. "This is truly transformative. It could be a template for the rest of the country."
Tracy Saula, chief product and experience officer at Highmark, told Fierce that it was critical for the insurer to identify the right partner for a behavioral health program like this to work. She said what "tipped the scales for Spring" was two key factors: One, its tech is able to harness data on patients to quickly match them with the provider that will be the best fit for their needs.
Two, the Spring Heath team was clearly aligned with Highmark on creating a superior patient experience. She said that when the Highmark team requested that the Mental Well-Being program flow though its My Highmark app, they pushed back on that—but not for the typical reasons a vendor might object.
Spring came back and agreed to embed the program in Highmark's app assuming it didn't make it more difficult for patients to access services, Saula said.
"We knew that this was going to be extraordinarily successful," she said. "I don't think we expected the outcomes to be so fast. Six months and it's just been truly, truly astonishing—almost a little bit unbelievable, in a good way."
She said that member feedback on the program has also been extremely positive. Most (77%) of users described the platform as easy to use, according to Highmark, beating the insurer's 70% target. The team gets frequent testimonials about how the program has helped them, Saula said.
That feedback has also made it easier for the team to identify where they can improve. For instance, members quickly flagged that they found costs confusing, so data on what a visit or medication may cost them were surfaced in the platform to make that more transparent.
Based on the positive results so far, Highmark intends to continue building on the program. It will roll out an employee assistance program (EAP) in January that will offer employer-sponsored therapy sessions, leader support resources and work-life balance tools.
It will also make Mental Well-Being available to people enrolled in the Children's Health Insurance Program next year.
Saula said Highmark was hesitant about an EAP, but it was the Spring Health team that first pushed it.
"We kind of shied away from it, and then, in working with our self funded clients, we really started to see the connection and the promise," she said. "So we bit the bullet and said, let's launch an integrated EAP offering, which took us into a whole new territory."