Telling a Better Care Story with Health Risk Assessments
By Matt Phillion
Though recognized as a chronic and treatable condition, substance use disorder (UD) is still often stigmatized, which leads patients and their families to look for help in ways different from treating other medical conditions, often turning to online searches before anywhere else.
This, in turn, means there’s opportunity to reach patients sooner and offer early intervention—if providers know how to reach them. Unlock Health has designed its Substance Abuse HRA, an online health risk assessment, to enable behavioral health treatment centers, healthcare providers, and integrated health systems a way to accurately identify individuals at risk for SUD and engage with them early on to personalize treatment plans and provide better outcomes.
A comprehensive assessment of an individual’s risk factors, enables clinicians to identify and engage with high-risk patients when they need it most, says Glenn Hadley, SVP of Strategy with Unlock Health.
“One of the challenges we face is that behavioral health as a whole is still considered the Wild West,” Hadley says. “We don’t have consolidated outcomes, consolidated products—if you have a very fuzzy bullseye, it’s hard to hit or even talk about. If I get 20 or 30 leaders of behavioral health organizations in the same room and ask them: what do you sell? I’ll get 20 or 30 very unique answers.”
If the industry struggles to define its offering, Hadley says, the general public will also struggle to know where to go for the care they need. There’s a need to consolidate the industry’s message and to work toward a unified outcomes metric that can show the efficacy occurring in the space, he explains.
“I think there’s tremendous work being done in behavioral health. We just can’t get behind one cohesive industry message for the public,” says Hadley.
Much of this comes back to discovery. Patients are looking for a safe environment for someone in need, and a therapeutic alliance between the patient and the provider. It’s a complicated search, and those looking for help or researching on behalf of a loved one are often not in the best space to do so.
“It’s a complex issue and try explaining that to a mom in 30 seconds—and we know that adult female heads of household are the decision makers for healthcare across America,” says Hadley. “They’re trying to move family members into treatment while also stuck in that feedback loop.”
And because of the stigma behavioral health that still lingers, those decision makers often won’t ask for help or feedback about where to go out of privacy worries, concerns about being judged, or other fears. Rather than asking medical professionals or even friends for guidance, their first stop is online, which is why an online HRA can be valuable as a first touchstone for patients in crisis.
An issue of storytelling
Hadley says that the quality of care and innovation is there—reaching the right patients has become more of a marketing issue than a care one.
“I believe that traditionally, behavioral health providers have been siloed and working on acquiring patients in their population, and there hasn’t been a large industry story,” he says. “I think marketing helps to catch up, as patient acquisition is becoming more nuanced. Providers in this space are starting to need a more mature kind of storytelling that behavioral health providers haven’t had access to or need for before.”
Changes in search habits are having a real impact for reaching those patient populations. The proliferation of AI has changed the way people search for information online, for example.
“Gone are the days someone just goes to Google and searches,” says Hadley. “We know that this awful thing called stigma keeps people from going to their neighbors for help. They may not want to tell anyone their son or daughter is struggling, and so they go straight to Google. But now confidence in Google search results have taken a hit, and with that comes the ability to tell this integrated story, following the patient journey from the pre-contemplative stage all the way to treatment.”
While it can feel strange to think in terms of marketing when it comes to sensitive areas like behavioral health, Hadley points out: “no margin, no mission.”
“We have to have a viable business in order to help people—you’ll help zero people if the door is closed,” he says. “You need to have the conversation about where your patients are coming from. They need help, so you need a viable referral business with other providers who don’t all treat the same kinds of patient, but you also have to have a direct-to-consumer option out there.”
Communication and trust
Explaining behavioral health in the complex language of the care itself won’t necessarily reach those who don’t know to search for, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy or Polyvagal Theory.
“Mom isn’t Googling that,” says Hadley. “The different modalities you subscribe to is the work, that’s how you establish the bond, but we have to reach the patient population so they’ll come through that door so you can work with them.”
You have a patient population who is at risk or in trouble, and that then encompasses the family surrounding them, so they are all, in their way, experiencing an illness.
“They need a trusted partner and are looking for opportunities to trust—but they’re also stuck in fight or flight,” says Hadley.
Traditionally, a search might lead to a treatment center, a phone call with an admissions rep, or a conversation about amenities.
“Nowadays, with trust falling in search, they’re looking for more than one vantage point: they trust but verify,” says Hadley.
It used to be possible to reach patients simply by pushing most of the marketing budget into search.
“It used to be so search-driven that if you were the number one organic result in your areas, you owned the marketplace regardless of quality of care and the work being done in these operations,” says Hadley. “Now there’s a need to be more diverse, more clinically efficient, more mature. The marketing is listening now so there’s an opportunity to better tell your story.”
There is great work being done in the industry, Hadley says—the area for improvement is getting the word out and connecting with those patients.
“I think our target has been so hard to hit that it’s hard for us to say we’re doing good work. Our job is to provide a safe place for people going through a medical emergency to go and to provide that therapeutic alliance,” he says. “The way clinical leaders are reaching out and diversifying is becoming more effective, but we just haven’t been able to adequately tell that story in where the patient population is listening.”
An HRA is a huge piece of demonstrating that placing trust in an operator or organization is well-founded, says Hadley.
“It’s an opportunity to take an assessment and determine: Do I need to go seek treatment right now? There’s so much noise out there and people aren’t able to just trust what they’re searching for, but if they’ve engaged with an HRA, by the time an operator is getting that phone call, they can start halfway down the journey,” says Hadley. “They know what’s going on with this patient and can talk with them from a place of knowledge.”
It’s possible to put this HRA in multiple places across many channels to meet the patient where they are.
“It acts as a doorway into your program,” says Hadley. “Our patient population is looking in multiple places, and you have the technology to be in all those spaces.”
Hadley is encouraged by the direction the industry is headed right now.
“If in 2018, you put together a panel on outcomes in behavioral health it would be sparsely attended, and now those kinds of panels are even headlining professional conferences. The industry as a whole is maturing and moving quickly,” says Hadley. “When you talk about trauma, anxiety, depression, it doesn’t have the same stigma as before. Substance use is getting there, and I’m encouraged by that. If you consider the reduction in stigma and the increased avenues for storytelling and accessibility, we’re in a really great spot, though we do have a long way to go.”
Matt Phillion is a freelance writer covering healthcare, cybersecurity, and more. He can be reached at matthew.phillion@gmail.com.