At Eleos Health, many of us are practicing behavioral health providers. Everything we do is about driving the best possible outcomes for our clients. We celebrate the joys of our work and we care deeply about providers’ daily challenges. We know how it feels when time constraints restrict our ability to handle the volume of cases that come our way. We know what it’s like to spend hours backpedaling with insurance, documentation, and other paperwork. And what about our top priority: clients in crisis?
This clash between real-world challenges and our academic training is precisely what Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Shiri Sadeh-Sharvit and co-author Simon Rego, PsyD, from Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine aimed to examine in their groundbreaking new study.
Dr. Sadeh-Sharvit notes, “We struggle as therapists because the manuals and the established protocols aren’t easy to apply in the real world.”
Fortunately, Eleos has the solution.
Augmented Intelligence = The Key To Effortless Adherence
Let’s look at the facts. This study analyzed a dataset of 17,607 treatment sessions across 322 therapists. The numbers confirm an age-old phenomenon. Known as Therapist Drift, practitioners trend towards a wide variety of interventions that don’t necessarily follow the steps to the outcomes in carefully controlled studies. Drs. Sadeh-Sharvit and Rego’s study showed that session summaries are the chief intervention to fall by the wayside.
And yet, when you look at the results from their study, the therapists who used session summaries saw substantially better session metrics such as:
12% greater likelihood of progress note completion (within 48 hours)
17% more interventions per session
49% greater listening ratio
83.3% greater likelihood of treatment homework with reporting on EHR progress notes
If the use of session summaries delivers a higher standard of care, the challenge becomes finding a way to enable treatment fidelity when time doesn’t allow it.
This is where Eleos steps to the plate.
Built for behavioral health by clinical experts, our proprietary voice-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology embeds seamlessly in existing Electronic Health Records (EHR) workflows. Eleos CareOps Automation digitizes behavioral health conversations, turning them into objective, structured data elements that serve as augmented intelligence for providers. Through progress note documentation suggestions, we reduce administrative work by over 30%. With session intelligence, providers can review key session elements, such as evidence-based techniques used, themes, topics, and keywords. This leaves providers free to do what they do best: analyze the data and make the best decisions for their clients.
Validated By Our Peers
Chief of Psychology, Dr. Simon A. Rego at Montefiore Health System a co-author of this study, stated that he’s “Never seen a real-world study like this.” As the Director of Training at Montefiore (and Einstein College of Medicine), Dr. Rego is keen to see treatment fidelity implemented in real-world centers.
When we spoke with Dr. Rego about his thoughts on the study’s results, academic training, therapist drift, and real-world challenges, he offered us some tantalizing insights.
Dr. Rego went on to say that when he’s working with trainees, it helps to think of patient outcomes like baking a chocolate cake.
“If you have the exact recipe of a top baker’s chocolate cake, and you really want to make that very same cake, you shouldn’t be surprised if yours doesn’t look like the picture when you remove or substitute certain ingredients. Though you might end up with a chocolate cake that’s pretty good, it might not be the best result.”
This anecdote is a proxy for the missing interventions critical to positive outcomes.
Dr. Rego concludes, “The more you deviate from adherence to the protocol, the more risk you have in not getting the results that the protocol has shown you. Your study, what you do, is in the spirit of what we teach, which is enhancing outcomes for the benefit of our students, clinics, patients & health of our community. Eleos is on the cutting edge.”
Serving Up Our Very Best
Since the dawn of humankind, tools have been invented, tested, and put to work as drivers of incredible change. As mental health looms as a significant global health concern, we need to deploy new kinds of advanced tools to accelerate quality treatment at scale. The moment is now and this technology is already being used by dozens of our trusted partners.
How can Eleos help your organization? We’d love to show you ways that we can reduce administrative work for providers while enabling a higher level of care.
Click on the button below to start the conversation.
After all, Eleos’ capabilities might just make the realization of modernized patient care a piece of cake.
Check out highlights from a conversation with Dr. Rego about this study:
Come say hello to us this November at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) annual convention. This study will be featured under the title “Are Behavioral Interventions in The Field Delivered as Initially Intended? Data from 17k Sessions.” We’d love to meet with you in person and hear about your organization’s goals.
