This week, the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT has kicked off a behavioral mobile health app challenge designed empower patients to manage their mental health and/or substance use disorders. The Behavioral Health Patient Empowerment Challenge will identify and highlight existing innovative technologies that use evidence based strategies to empower self management of behavioral health disorders.
Approximately 20% of adults and 13% of adolescents suffer from mental disorders each year and 8.7% of Americans aged 12 and older experience substance dependence or abuse each year. The rates is even higher for mental health patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma, etc. Failture to treat these conditions can result in even poor health outcomes and higher healthcare costs. Rates of mental health problems are significantly higher for patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma, and heart conditions and failure to treat both physical and mental health conditions results in poorer health outcomes and higher health care costs.
Health IT has the potential to enable self management of behavioral health disorders (including both mental health and substance use disorders) as well as to act as a treatment extender for patients with limited access to care. Fewer than half of adults and only one-third of children with mental disorders and only 11 percent of individuals with substance use disorders receive treatment.
Participants have until the end date of September 6th to submit their application that must be available for use by consumers on a widely-used platform for mobile devices.
The top three finishers will be invited to the Technology Innovations for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Disorders Conference at the White House held on September 16th where the winner will be given an opportunity to demo the winning tool. The top three tools will be highlighted on a behavioral health technology innovations website which is being developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in conjunction with this conference.
Review Criteria
The review panel will make selections based upon the following criteria:
- Evidence base for the functionality included in the application
- Application usability, including intuitiveness, capacity to engage the user, and user interface
- Comprehensiveness of the technology for addressing the behavioral health needs of the target population
- Existing ability to be integrated with EHR/PHRs or other tools
For more information, visit http://behavioralhealth.challengepost.com/
