by John Minahan, CEO of Mindful Health Solutions
Mindful Health Solutions is an evidence-based practice. Clinically, offering evidence-based care differentiates us from many of the other larger practices in the United States. There are many factors that go into being an evidence-based clinical practice, but today we are going to discuss only one aspect: tracking patients’ outcome data with their depression and anxiety scores.
How we collect patient outcome data
Over the years, Mindful Health Solutions has had tens of thousands of patient visits. Almost every time a patient visit occurs, they complete a PHQ-9 and a GAD-7. The PHQ-9 is a depression score. The GAD-7 tracks general anxiety. Because of this structure, we have tens of thousands of clinical outcome data spanning years of treatment. The data is anonymized but still tied to a medical record number so we can track how well a patient is improving over time with various courses of treatment.
Capturing this data is extremely powerful for our psychiatrists and their patients. Individually, that data is important to help each provider track the outcome of their patients. But we have gone a step further. Over the past year, we integrated business intelligence tools and now have the ability to see the outcomes of the total patient population. As a result, we can see what is and is not working when fighting depression and anxiety.
Understanding patient outcomes is especially important for interventional psychiatry as we can track a cohort of patients who have been diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and how they respond to medications, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and esketamine. We can also look at the data by insurance payor, treatment code, age, gender, and several other factors.
What the data tells us
First, it is amazing and heartwarming to see our improved patient outcomes. We have had patients that have gone through many types of medication over a long time and are still very depressed. Then, when TMS was prescribed to those patients, a majority of them not only responded, but responded well. For those patients who did not respond well, we prescribed esketamine. After being prescribed esketamine, most of those patients responded well.
All this information is great to see, and we can see it all directly in the data. We have changed thousands of lives, and we have the evidence to prove it. Internally, the data is a great reminder of our mission. We are here to help people, and it is powerful to see how we are doing that.
Let us look at an example of this data. In the example below, this patient came to us with a high depression score of 24. After a course of TMS, the patient has a score of 3. These results are life-changing! Now, add a few thousand more patients like this, and you will understand how excited we are to continue to grow and expand our access to care.
We have the most comprehensive collection of depression and anxiety data in the world. And now, we have the tools to empower our psychiatrists to review, research, and publish so we can help other doctors improve the lives of their own patients. We look forward to sharing what we know about interventional psychiatry with others in the field to make as positive an impact on mental health care as we can.
