Monday, October 6, 2014

A Mobile Intervention for High-Cost Medicaid Patients

The telecommunications company Verizon has teamed up with a technology start up called Ginger.io to develop and test a mobile health monitoring intervention.  The intervention, coactionHealth, is designed to aide high-utilizer Medicaid beneficiaries whose care is particularly difficult due to co-occurring mental and physical disorders. These patients may experience mental conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder in addition physical conditions like heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) or diabetes.  The smartphone based intervention included various health tracking applications and an on-call support team including a nurse, therapist and wellness coach.  Users are asked daily survey questions about their wellbeing and certain answers alert members of the support team to possible depressive symptoms or suicidal thoughts.

Results from a small pilot study of 10 patients indicate positive outcomes from use of the intervention. All participants avoided hospitalization during the three month study period and all reported increased confidence in managing their disease state. Additional studies are currently in place to further evaluate coactionHealth with larger groups of patients.