Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic Partner with a mental health software provider neural flow Last August, ease the health care burnout crisis by: Provide a nurse Use technology from the Philadelphia-based startup. A year later, the partners say more hospitals should roll out such initiatives, as nurses using NeuroFlow are seeing quick and positive effects on their mental health.
Independent Blue Cross Foundation Funded the program, which was launched at three Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic hospitals in Pennsylvania: Nazareth Hospital in Philadelphia, Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Yerton, and St. Mary’s Medical Center in Langhorne. The program gives more than 1,800 nurses access to Neuroflow’s app, which provides self-directed care to maintain good mental health.
According to a Trinity and Neuroflow case study, about 20 percent of nurses eligible for the program signed up for the app, which is well above the 6 percent average sign-up rate for similar behavioral health solutions. These nurses use the app to screen for depression, record daily insights like sleep patterns and mood scores, document their experiences, and access educational content on how to deal with mental health issues.
Using NeuroFlow World Health Organization 5 Well-Being Index (WHO-5) Assessment. This brief self-assessment measures an individual’s well-being on a scale of 1-100, with 100 representing the best possible well-being. The choice to use this assessment was “very purposeful,” Matt Miclette, Neuroflow’s vice president of clinical operations, said in an interview.
Miclette, herself a registered nurse, noted that the standard tool for depression screening is Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ). He said the suppliers knew PHQ well. It’s been in use for so long that patients have come to expect these types of questions from their primary care provider and that they know how to answer them so as not to raise any alarms.
Neuroflow’s platform chose WHO-5, which uses less clinical language. Neuroflow is the first to find that WHO-5 is more effective at screening for mental health issues in startups during their entrepreneurial journey, Miclette said. Program with the military.
“WHO-5 is not just a depression scale, it’s actually a health scale,” he said. “The difference is that we can actually use it not only to see if someone has depression, but also to see if they’re thriving and doing well at work.”
For Trinity’s program, 29 percent of nurses evaluated had scores indicating lower well-being. At the end of the nine-month case study, nurses with the lowest WHO-5 scores had significantly improved well-being scores.
E.g, Among nurses with a WHO-5 score of less than 50, 53% achieved a clinically significant improvement of 10 or more points after 90 days. After four to eight months, 79 percent of nurses who initially scored below 50 had improved their scores by 10 or more.
Neuroflow also provided nurses with tailored interventions 39 times over a nine-month period, based on nurses’ WHO-5 ratings and their user data. According to Miclette, these interventions actively support Trinity’s nurses, triage them to the correct level of care and prevent potential behavioral health crises.
For Miclette, a key reason Trinity’s nurses love Neuroflow’s app is the flexibility it incorporates into mental health care. Nurses are delighted that they can choose from any setting they want to complete a wellness activity, such as meditation or guided breathing, every five minutes.
“Nurse shifts are long, and sometimes the last thing we want to do after a hospital is return to another facility,” he said. “The app gives people the opportunity to think about their mental health outside the workplace and engage at home.”
Photo: Antonio Guillem, Getty Images
