Data Driven Mental Health Care: GT Healthcare & Creyos
Published: 18/12/2023
Written by: Creyos
Summary
As the founder of GT Healthcare, Gabrielle Thompson strives to deliver the best mental health care possible. To achieve this, her team relies on objective data to reach an accurate diagnosis faster, measure treatment efficacy, and empower patients throughout their health journey.
That’s why they use Creyos.
Read the full case study
The Challenges
- Patients often self diagnose based on information they encounter online and on social media, and these assumptions need to be validated by a healthcare professional.
- Mental health conditions require complex decision making and can be a challenge to diagnose using only subjective information from clinical interviews.
- Tracking the efficacy of treatment often relies on subjective data that is self reported, leaving room for error.
The Solutions
- GT Healthcare uses a data- and results-driven approach to aid in practice and clinical decision making.
- Being a telehealth practice, computerized cognitive assessments allow GT Healthcare to administer assessments to patients at home or during sessions.
- Being an interdisciplinary practice, with specialities including family medicine and mental health care, GT Healthcare houses patient data all in one platform for seamless referrals.
The Results
- GT Healthcare clinicians can confidently reach a diagnostic decision and implement a treatment plan in 2–3 visits.
- EMR integration means that the admin team saves 1 to 1.5 hours a day on time to create session notes. (5–10 minutes per patient for a daily volume of 8–10 patients.)
- Patients feel empowered by getting an immediate detailed report of their symptoms and ongoing data on treatment efficacy, plus they experience better mental health outcomes.
Introducing GT Healthcare: Boosting Mental Health Care Access
GT Healthcare is a mental health and family medicine clinic servicing all of California, serving patients of all ages via telehealth. The team of clinicians—nurse practitioner, therapists, and nutritionist—see a broad range of patients for conditions ranging from anxiety, depression, ADHD, learning disorders, mood disorders, bipolar, schizophrenia, PTSD, insomnia and more.
Mental health is something I’m really passionate about. It's really hard for patients to find one place where they can get complete, well-rounded care for everything they need. So I wanted to create a one stop shop where our team can work in an interdisciplinary fashion and make sure that we can all make the best decisions for our patients together.
— Gabrielle Thompson, Founder and FNP-C, GT Healthcare
The Challenge: Navigating Subjective Mental Health Data
Mental health care is often led by a patient’s subjective experience, gathered through clinical interviews. The GT Healthcare team finds that trial and error can lead to slower results in mental health care—and they’re not willing to take that risk.
On the patient side: an abundance of information available online and on social media means patients increasingly turn to self diagnosis to understand their challenges and symptoms. The GT Healthcare team has seen patients come into the clinic with ideas about what assessments, medications, or treatments they would like to try.
For clinicians, managing patient expectations is key. Rather than jump right to prescribing the medications a patient has heard may be effective for their symptoms, clinicians take time with patients to validate their diagnosis and develop an appropriate treatment plan. Validating that diagnosis using only subjective processes leaves room for uncertainty, so Gabrielle looks for a solution that offers objective measures and gives her and the team confidence.
The Solution: Finding Confidence In Objective Measurement
Knowing that objective data would enhance quality of care, Gabrielle set out to find a data-driven solution. Creyos Health ticked all the boxes. I didn’t want to start treating conditions like ADHD without objective measurement, she says, otherwise it’s hard to gauge success of treatment and progress.
Now, almost every patient that comes to GT Healthcare starts with an initial cognitive and mental health assessment that includes Creyos Health. Clinicians get a baseline of a patient's cognitive performance at that moment in time. They then pair this information with lab results measuring biological markers of health. Together, these results provide a holistic picture of the patient’s cognitive and mental health. This helps shape total care, Gabrielle says. We’re often treating more than one thing at a time, and symptoms change over time.
The GT Healthcare team often finds that resolving one set of symptoms leads to a new area of focus showing up, allowing unaddressed symptoms to be worked on. The reports generated through Creyos give them concrete indicators of a patient’s areas of strengths, improvements, weaknesses, and opportunities.
What Creyos helps with most is helping me confirm what I think is going on or find out if there’s a possibility of something else causing the same symptoms. I can narrow down a diagnosis using measurements like scoring.
— Gabrielle Thompson, Founder and FNP-C, GT Healthcare
The Result: Clinician Confidence and Empowered Patients
Gabrielle says the benefits seen by the GT Healthcare team since adopting Creyos and integrating objective measures into their practice are far-reaching, including:
- Better clinical decision making
- Longitudinal tracking
- Workflow efficiency
- Better patient experience
Better Clinical Decision Making
In as few as 2–3 visits, Gabrielle and the GT Healthcare team can articulate a patient’s diagnosis, identify their particular symptoms, and create a tailored treatment plan. The data from Creyos Health assessments has helped them do this with confidence.
We avoid a kind of broad “every medication fits all” prescription approach, says Gabrielle, because we know there’s not a one-size-fits-all, even for people with the same diagnosis.
Gabrielle finds that patients truly appreciate having the immediate feedback that comes from the cognitive assessment reports. Plus, because of the gamified nature of the tasks, patients find them fun to complete! This has attracted new patients who want to be tested and increased the completion rates of tasks and assessments sent to patients.
Creyos supports my decision-making. Having these reports gives me clear answers about where there are deficits, like in attention, versus other types of measures. I’m really able to read out a patient’s specific symptoms and target which medication I think will work best for them.
— Gabrielle Thompson, Founder and FNP-C, GT Healthcare
Easier Longitudinal Tracking
At GT Healthcare, patient reassessment happens as frequently as every three months so the team can track changes in symptoms. During regular reassessment, they can measure treatment efficacy and determine if any adjustments are needed.
Having a data-driven reassessment process offers a clear way to measure improvement and convey that progress to patients. The GT Healthcare team recognizes that patients dealing with mental health challenges can have a hard time measuring small progress. "When a bad day arises, it's easy for a patient to have a hard time recognizing their symptoms are improving. During reassessment, Gabrielle can offer patients hope and a broader perspective. She can show them measurable progress and identify any new areas of improvement.
Workflow Efficiency
Being a one stop shop for mental health and family medicine, GT Healthcare operates with an internal referral system. Patients with complex conditions and symptoms can move quickly from a session with their therapist to being referred to Gabrielle, as part of an in-house treatment team, for cognitive testing using Creyos Health.
For example, a patient coming in with complex symptoms might indicate that they have a history of PTSD. Right away, Gabrielle can test using the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for the DSM 5 (PCL-5) and learn that the patient’s depression or anxiety is connected to PTSD. Then, she can work alongside the therapist to tailor a treatment plan and follow up on measuring each of these conditions distinctly.
Another major benefit has been the integration between Creyos Health and GT Healthcare’s EMR, which has streamlined administration time and reduced the risk of error. The front office staff is saving 5–10 minutes per patient on administrative work such as recording session notes. Across their daily volume of 8–10 patients, those minutes add up to 1–1.5 hours saved each day.
I know my front office team really appreciates the integration because it does save time and also improves accuracy—the right patient tests go into the right patient chart. That's huge!
— Gabrielle Thompson, Founder and FNP-C, GT Healthcare
Better Patient Experiences
By delivering streamlined referrals, confident diagnosis and treatment plans, measurable progress reports, and reassessment, GT Healthcare empowers patients at every step of their mental health and physical health care journey.
Gabrielle and the GT Healthcare team achieve their goals of delivering the highest quality mental health care with an offering that stands out from the crowd: interdisciplinary practices all in one place and informed by objective data, thanks to Creyos Health.
Creyos Health is implemented into my everyday routine and it lets us go above and beyond the services patients can get elsewhere, which is really valuable to the practice and our patients.