Two Chairs, a hybrid behavioral health provider, launched a customized clinician dashboard for delivering measurement-based care.
The therapist-facing platform analyzes patient data with the goal of enabling therapists to quickly adjust treatment plans and improve outcomes. Therapists can view how a diagnosis maps onto mental health assessments and symptom progression with visual tools like graphs and scales. The dashboard also offers insight into cross-clinician compliance with measurement-based care protocols.
Measurement-based care is evidence-based and improves clinical outcomes. Yet fewer than 20% of behavioral health practitioners integrate it into their practice. Part of the reason is clinicians are not trained on the approach and lack the necessary tools to use it, Two Chairs argues. That poses a barrier to the adoption of value-based care.
“Historically this is an industry that has measured almost nothing and without measurement, you can’t detect quality,” Two Chairs’ CEO and founder Alex Katz told Fierce Healthcare. “We want to be a force for change toward a higher quality and more value-oriented system.”
A major part of Two Chairs’ measurement-based approach is patient surveys known as “mental health snapshots,” launched earlier this year. Patients answer the questionnaire ahead of each visit, which includes questions from standardized, clinically validated assessments of anxiety and depression.
Patients then receive a snapshot of their progress in areas like sleep, mood, self-esteem and more. Compliance with the surveys is at 94%, according to Katz. Responses allow not only the clinician but also the patient to track their progress and be more engaged in their care journey.
Two Chairs also measures the patient-provider therapeutic alliance, an uncommon yet critical metric, the company argues. Verifying that patients feel they are with the right provider throughout their care journey ensures patients feel seen and will continue to stay in therapy. The vast majority of Two Chairs patients (98%) report feeling like they are with the right therapist, Katz said.
The industry standard for measuring access to care is by whether someone has a first session or not, Katz added. But that is not a good indicator as to whether they continue treatment. Two Chairs patients get to a fourth session more than 90% of the time—notably higher than existing industry estimates.