Brigham and Women's Hospital has tapped mental health startup Rose to help support clinicians' mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The health crisis has taken a toll on the mental and emotional health of front-line workers.
During the pilot program, emergency health care professionals at Brigham and Women’s Hospital will receive access to the Rose platform, which monitors their levels of well-being and detects changes in real time.
The platform collects data from users in the form of questionnaires and free-response journal entries, which can be completed in as few as 30 seconds, according to the company. Rose uses those data to track mental health, monitor stress levels, identify triggers and get ahead of more extreme events.
Rose, which has its roots at Johns Hopkins University, developed a HIPAA-compliant mental health monitoring platform and mobile app platform that is powered by patented artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology, according to the company.
The use of AI enables the platform to identify key indicators and warning markers for the presence or advancement of mental health symptoms in a user’s responses to questions and prompts.
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Rose can detect early warning signs of numerous mental health conditions including anxiety, depression and trauma, the company said.
The startup also provides each user with a personalized feed of curated content from its library of more than 1,000 articles and videos based on the user’s history, behavior and app inputs.
Rose is developing "smarter" mental health, according to the company, by leveraging machine learning to augment in-person therapy sessions.
Front-line workers are experiencing an unprecedented number of patients, cases, deaths and risks to their own health, all of which exact a heavy toll on their mental state, according to Kavi Misri, founder and CEO of Rose.
"We simply can’t ignore this emerging crisis that threatens the mental health and stability of our essential workers – they need support,” Misri said.
A study of more than 1,200 healthcare workers surveyed in China found that roughly half showed symptoms of depression or anxiety, according to a JAMA Network Open article published in March.
Hanni Stoklosa, M.D., and Desiree Azizoddin, M.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine wanted to find a digital platform to support emergency room clinicians.
“The committee on wellness in the Brigham’s Department of Emergency Medicine is acutely aware of and prepared to support the clinicians who loyally care for patients during this COVID-19 pandemic,” Stoklosa said in a statement.
Catalyst @ Health 2.0, which develops and implements programs for piloting and commercializing healthcare technology, helped set up the pilot program selection process.
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Rose was selected from more than 80 quality submissions and a rigorous application and technology demonstration process.
"Rather than fragmented tools and programs aiming to ‘treat burnout,’ we need to better identify and tackle systemwide factors that lead to burnout while promoting a healthy workplace for our healthcare workers,” said John Shivdat, M.D., Rose adviser and chairman and medical director of HCA Coliseum Health System in Georgia, in a statement.
“Rose is tailor-made to address this challenge—proactively identifying individuals who are at greater risk of burnout and customizing interventions and content to their unique needs, while providing mental health professionals with the data and insights necessary to deliver personalized content more efficiently and effectively," Shivdat said.