Behavioral health software is ripe for disruption
This post is part of a series of takeaways from working in the behavioral health space over the past year
In addition to the PPACA and MACRA, Medicare-reimbursed somatic care had another legislative catalyst relative to Medicaid-reimbursed addiction treatment: The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act). The HITECH Act created the Meaningful Use (MU) program, which bestowed financial incentives to eligible providers to adopt electronic health records (EHRs). Eligible providers included physicians, nurse practitioners, some physician assistants, certified nurse-midwives, and dentists.
Unfortunately for behavioral health, most of the providers were ineligible for MU incentives because they were addiction counselors or mental health therapists. The result was a market failure whereby EHR vendors primarily designed for and sold to somatic care providers to the detriment of behavioral care providers.
As a physician, I’ve had deep experience with most of the major EHRs for somatic care, and they were tolerable at best relative to modern standards of software design and user experience. As an executive at an addiction treatment center, I’ve worked with the two major EHRs for behavioral health, and they were both travesties.
There is a large opportunity for talented entrepreneurs, designers and engineers to team up with some experts in the addiction space to devise scalable business models in which well designed EHRs can disrupt the behavioral health market.
While it’s important to have functional, decently designed, and affordable EHRs, they only solve for a narrow set of problems in behavioral health. There is a burgeoning ecosystem of technology innovation seeking to solve a broader set of problems in behavioral health, particularly those faced directly by patients. Below is a small sampling of technology-amenable problems in addiction treatment.
Next post: If we focus on one population, it should be people in the prison system
