LunaJoy Health, a women’s mental health provider, has revamped its virtual certification program intended for clinicians working with women.
The online training, which is available only to LunaJoy clinicians for now, counts toward CME credit. Next quarter, LunaJoy hopes to make it available more widely and to also offer broader CE credits. The program focuses on improving the skills needed for specialty care in maternal and broader women’s mental health. It is designed to explore the complex interplay between medical and psychiatric disorders, which have historically been treated disparately, LunaJoy argues.
The certification consists of three parts and takes 18 to 24 hours to complete on average. More than 30 lectures are available on condition-specific best practices, from maternal birth trauma to treating bipolar disorder. There are fewer than 500 trained psychiatrists in reproductive mental health, according to nonpartisan nonprofit Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance. And most residents are not exposed to pregnancy or postpartum psychiatry unless they specifically choose to specialize in it, executives say.
“Patients come in and they’re often met with these generalist solutions,” LunaJoy CEO Sipra Laddha, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare. “They’re often given non-specific mental health treatment … Women don’t feel like their needs are met, they aren’t heard, inaccurate diagnosis is rampant.”
Participants seeking the full certification are tested and given scenarios conductedF with artificial-intelligence-generated patients based on real-world cases. The program also provides in-depth real recordings of patients with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders to help clinicians learn from the firsthand experiences of women. Their stories include what their symptoms were, what barriers to care they faced and what their treatment looked like.
LunaJoy worked with a range of specialists to curate diverse voices for the training, which spans the entire female experience from puberty to pregnancy to perimenopause and beyond. Among the multidisciplinary experts who contributed were psychiatrists, OB-GYNs, urologists, pediatricians, sexual health experts, clinicians, doulas and lactation consultants. Training topics also include postpartum recovery and patients undertaking in vitro fertilization.
The original version of the program was launched in the early days of the company for LunaJoy staff “to make sure that all of our clinicians were practicing from an evidence-based standard,” Laddha said. That program was focused on reading assignments, lectures and showing knowledge mastery. The latest version, in the works for nearly a year, incorporates generative AI to simulate education that would happen during a residency.
“This is all a very long painstaking process that happens over years and years for most clinicians, but now with genAI we can give clinicians a plethora of experiences,” Laddha said. “We are going to need to do much more with much less over the coming years,” she added, referring to the threats to women’s healthcare access under the Trump administration.
An AI patient avatar responds dynamically to clinician interviews and interventions, allowing for real-time training. After an interaction, a report is generated on how the interaction went with feedback on soft skills as well as domain mastery. To date, this has been largely done only in time-intensive supervised patient interviews in training settings, according to Laddha. Now, AI can replicate these efforts and push medical education forward at a record pace. Another benefit is clinicians can access a great variety of patients to better understand disparities and cultural barriers, no matter where they are based, Laddha said.
LunaJoy is exploring partnerships with med schools to augment traditional in-person coursework and fill educational gaps. Laddha is presenting the program to Wellstar Health System, which has an OB-GYN residency program.
LunaJoy is also currently adding modules that specifically support OB-GYN groups. The training is intended to help them identify high-risk patients, proactively refer them to the right mental health treatment and mitigate risk with interventions. “There's a lot of learned helplessness, they don’t feel like they know what to do in these situations and they’re very stressed by it,” Laddha said.
An example of an intervention to help prevent postpartum depression or psychosis is sleep, Laddha explained. OBs should advise patients with a history of these conditions early on about the importance of sleep and a risk of recurrence without adequate sleep. Patients can then plan ahead to build out a network of support to ensure they can get at least five hours of consecutive sleep when needed.
“LunaJoy crowdsourced key clinical perspectives and incorporated academic checkpoints to bring participants a broad and accountable educational experience,” Sheril Kalarithara, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at the Morehouse School of Medicine, said in a press release. “Generative AI can provide quality at scale for students and seasoned clinical professionals who need the exposure to and experience with all patient populations and cases. This is a program that also considers emotional intelligence, and participants will get feedback on their cultural sensitivity and interpersonal skills with patients.”