Removing Barriers to Accessing Mental Health Resources with CredibleMind

Removing Barriers to Accessing Mental Health Resources with CredibleMind

Webinar Transcript:

Jared Stowers: Good day, everyone. We’d like to welcome you to today’s presentation, Removing Barriers to Accessing Mental Health Resources with CredibleMind. Before we get started, I’m going to run through a couple of housekeeping items regarding the Zoom technology we’ll be using today. First up is Q and A. We’ll be taking questions in written form. You may ask us a written question by accessing the Q and A tab on the bottom of your screen. There’s a box into which you can type your question and select all panelists. Click send when you’re done. We suggest you submit your questions as soon as you think of them so you don’t forget and we’ll address them after the presentation.

I’ll answer one of your questions right now. How do I receive a copy of today’s presentation? Within a week we’ll send an email to all who registered for today’s session that contains the replay of this webinar. That way you can view it again and share it with any of your colleagues who may not have been able to join us today. Now I’ll turn the call over to Jen Benz, Senior Vice President and Communications Lead of Segal Benz. Welcome Jen.

Jen Benz: Thanks Jared. And welcome everyone. We are delighted to be here with you today. As Jared said, this is Removing Barriers to Accessing Mental Health Resources. We’re going to have a great conversation. And I am joined by two fantastic experts in this area. Deryk Van Brunt, who is the CEO and founder of CredibleMind, and also a clinical professor at UC California, Berkeley. And then my colleague, Dr. Sadhna Paralkar, who is our SVP and National Medical Director at Segal. Deryk and Sadhna, thanks so much for being with us today.

Deryk Van Brunt: Hello.

Sadhna Paralkar: Thank you.

Jen: Great. So just a little bit about us before we get started. For those of you who don’t know about Segal, Segal is a comprehensive HR consulting and employee benefits firm. We cover all aspects of benefits and wellbeing from health and retirement to compliance, as well as an organizational effectiveness practice and a career and compensation strategies practice. And of course the communications practice that I lead. When it comes to the communications practice, we are so excited about this work of employee benefits and trying to really get people engaged in these programs. And we always say this very proudly, that we help great organizations inspire people to improve their health, their finances, and their futures. And that work of really connecting employee benefits to the people who need them and need to use them is what we’re really passionate about, and a lot of what we’re going to be talking about today.

So what we’re going to cover today is to start with a little bit about our mental health crisis. We know that you all know how dire mental health is right now. But we’re going to talk about just a few aspects of that, spend a couple minutes on it. We’re going to talk about the challenges for benefits leaders and in particular, the challenges of getting people engaged in programs and really using the programs that are out there. And then we’re going to do a deep dive on how CredibleMind helps. And Sadhna and I are going to talk a lot about how we are so excited about this platform and why we were so excited when we first met Deryk and his team. And then Deryk is going to share a lot with how they built it and as well as do a quick demo of the platform. And then we’ll have plenty of time for Q and A. So let’s dig right in and talk a little bit about what’s going on with mental health. And I’m going to pass things over to you, Sadhna.

Sadhna: Thanks, Jen. This is a very, very important topic for us. So some of you know me. I’m Segal’s national medical director. I’m a primary care physician in occupational health, but I do, as a primary care physician, have sort of seen a lot of needs from patients on mental health. And I’m the first to take the blame for this whole atmosphere. Because when we train in medical school, that was years ago for me, and up until 10 years ago, we primary care physicians saw our patients for their physical health. We always treated mental health as an afterthought, and we should take blame as a society of primary care physicians. And now the AFP is talking pretty loudly about it. So we really ignored mental health up until just 10 years ago. And that’s why our US mental health system is broken.

I can completely see it coming. Half of the adults have mental health issues in their lifetime. One in five each year. Workplace stress alone has produced to about 200 billion in US healthcare costs and 1 trillion in global productivity. And then let’s blame COVID somewhat because COVID really exacerbated these issues. But let me read you some statistics from an article I read recently that was written pre-COVID. So the mental health crisis actually began pre-COVID. COVID just exacerbated its effects. But let me just read you a couple of good statistics I read recently, especially in adolescent healthcare, people aged 10 and 19 years. One in six people of the mental health crisis are people 10 to 19 years old. Globally, depression, anxiety, and behavior disorders are leading causes of illness among adolescents. Guess what? Suicide. Teenage suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among 15 to 19 years old.

They are all our beneficiaries, somehow or the other. Consequences of failing to address adolescent mental health conditions extend to adulthood. So obviously it doesn’t result in any productive society. And what really caused this pre-COVID? There is a fantastic article I recently read in the Atlantic about the effects of social media and how it has shaped what the adolescent community is kind of affected by. Factors can contribute to stress during adolescence, including exposure to adversity, pressure to conform with peers, and exploration of identity. All of those existed even before social media, but social media really made it prominent because now you can get those adversity pressure to conform with peers, all of that through your smartphone, as opposed to previously, it used to be only in-person interaction. So it has just magnified the magnitude of the problem. Media influence and gender norms can also exacerbate disparity between adolescents in reality and their perception or aspirations for the future. So all of these emotional disorders have heavily contributed toward the mental health stress. Next slide.

So this one-on-one patient provider model is another problem we have. And we have a massive shortage of mental health providers. Any of you who have sought any kind of behavioral health counseling in the last five years or so will notice that. That your appointment is not even available in 90 days from now. And they say, "Go to the emergency room." That’s the worst place to treat any kind of behavioral health disorder because it’s the last avenue through which to get behavioral health counseling. So currently it’s the outpatient settings of EAP coaching. And we’ll talk a little bit more about the employer resources available to us, but the traditional counseling sessions are standalone, and there’s a huge shortage of mental health professionals, about 400,000.

I can vouch for that because I have a couple of psychiatrist colleagues who get solicited by recruiters literally nonstop more than any other specialty that I’m aware of. And the pay for the psychiatrist has risen through the roof because there is simply a big shortage, especially in small towns. Telemedicine is trying to overcome that barrier because now you can actually seek counseling through somebody out of state or out of town. But it’s getting there. It’s slowly getting there. So the next slide will show you the CredibleMind results on the survey they did for about 1200 people. And you can see the stress, anxiety, work life balance, depression, and body image. That body image thing goes back to my adolescent statistics, because that’s a big deal for that age group. It kind of reduces a little bit when you get older, but the stress anxiety continues.

Now we have work from home stress, going back to work stress. Our colleague Sarah just recently wrote an article on our website on the stress of going back to work. It’s important to kind of take all these changing nuances into consideration because we have gone through a lot during COVID and after COVID as well. I wouldn’t say after COVID, we’re still in COVID. But 83% have a moderate to high interest in their spiritual wellbeing, which is a good thing, which is what the survey showed. 26% admitted they’ve been diagnosed with a mental health condition either of one of the five on the left side, or it could be something else. And 22% feel that they’re not diagnosed but have significant mental health concerns. So in general, we are seeing a lot of crisis started before COVID, but exacerbated by COVID.

Jen: Yeah, thanks Sadhna. This situation is definitely really challenging for benefits leaders and everyone on this call to navigate. And we hear this from our clients all the time, whether it’s a high-tech company or a university or a big multi-employer benefit fund. Everyone is challenged right now to solve for mental health needs. And there’s an overwhelming number of solutions in the marketplace. Very hard to know what actually makes a difference, what you can get people to use. It’s very difficult getting people to the right resource at the right time, in terms of do I need something for mindfulness? Do I need something for clinical depression? Do I need something for helping me deal with a family issue? There’s just a lot of different scenarios to navigate through. And then most of the data that we have is only at the point of seeking clinical therapeutics, which Deryk will talk about, is a very, very small portion of the people who actually need or are seeking mental healthcare in some way.

So it’s a confusing and overwhelming landscape for benefit leaders right now. And it’s really, really hard to get traction with the providers. This is something that we hear from our clients all the time, that even though there are all of these new programs that have been put in place, it is very difficult to drive engagement and to get people to take advantage of their mental health benefits. And to really, really get people to take action, it requires an ongoing, very high touch communication campaign. We do this with a lot of our clients and we’re able to get good engagement, but it takes that big ongoing effort. And we’re still only capturing the people who want to engage with those specific programs.

So we were really looking at this whole landscape and the challenges for benefits leaders and how big of a need this is when we met Deryk and his team just a few months ago. And we were so excited to learn about what they’ve been building with CrediblemMind and how this really fits into the landscape really well. So Deryk, I’m going to pass it over to you to talk about CredibleMind, what you’ve built and how you’re solving for some of what Sadhna and I have shared.

Deryk: Well, thank you both. And let me just say that this mental health crisis we’re in is very sobering with respect to the roles that you folks have. And what I hope to do is share with you a little research and just some good news, right? We’ve kind of heard the bad news. So we did some research wearing my Berkeley hat with folks at Cal, but also at Harvard, Stanford, and number of folks in industry, and patients and others to really try and understand what we could do that’s practical and can move the needle. And we had an aha moment, which is the slide that I want to share with you right here. And it’s something that none of us knew going into this research. And it’s the following: Of people that have mental distress, which we’ve heard are very high number, these are your employees, members, students, et cetera, roughly three out of four are not interested in engaging with professional services.

They’re interested in learning what they can do on their own or for a friend that’s likely to be effective. And only one in four are actually seeking professional services. So we’ve kind of had a little bit of a miss lately because we somehow have been thinking, lots of us, well, if anything, if you had asked someone about these statistics, they might flip them and say, well, most people just want to maybe try therapy or medication. That’s not the case. And there are reasons for that, cultural belief models and other kinds of things. So this created a wonderful opportunity to say, hmm, could we build a system that would meet people where they are in their journey? Where 75% could find what they need for themselves? And then for the 25%, roughly that want some more extensive and deeper kind of professional service to pass them through.

So one of the terms I like to use is no wrong door. Could we create a one stop shop for evidence-based mental health self-care that’s fun and easy to use and can drive lots of people to it? Because as a whole breadth of all the topics, all the evidence-based approaches, all the different kinds of resources, apps, videos, podcasts, articles, et cetera, all in one easy to navigate place. And so that’s what we built. So with that, I think the easiest thing to do is to just show it to you.

And so this system, by the way, it’s a website. It would be co-branded the way you would like it for the defined population that you care about. You might end up with multiple portals actually. And the homepage is sort of customized and to do things like make sure that the topics that you care about are being surfaced to the top. So let’s not worry too much about the navigation, the look and feel, but essentially this system’s doing two things. One, on its own it’s for self-care around mental health, a one stop shop. And two, it’s going to link people to any resources or services or benefits that you folks offer. So it’s kind of all in one place. Okay?

So let’s take two different use cases if you will. One is someone has a question that they know what the question is. And the other use case would be someone is not feeling great. They’re at work, they’re feeling sort of stressed, anxious, but they don’t know what it is. I’ll do very briefly a quick demo on each of these. There’s a pretty powerful search tool up here. You just start typing something. I’ve just started typing depression. And immediately you get whole topic centers associated with depression assessments you could take about what your risk levels are. You could dive into various resources. Rather than just deep dive you somewhere, let me take you down a different path, which gives you a sense of the breadth of all the topics here.

Because as I said, and it’s a bold statement, our attempt is to cover all topics, all evidence-based approaches and all resources associated with mental health self-care. And we’re pretty much there. So these are categories of topics. So for traditional mental health, you’ve got things like anxiety, stress, depression, addiction, eating disorders, the kinds of things you’d expect to see. I’ll come back to one of these in a minute. But we help people through life changes. Maybe someone’s going through a housing transition or job transition. Emotional health issues, these are very big. Traffic’s been going up to these. Going through a period of grief or loneliness. And on up through the rest. I won’t click through all of these. Altogether over 240 topics. The number one search topic is anxiety. So I’m going to go ahead and just select that to give you a sense of when you pick a topic, what is it that you see?

The first thing that we want you to know is that you are not alone and that there are things that you can do that science says works to help you reduce your levels of anxiety. And so what people often do, some people just start scrolling. What are good resources? And when I say resources, articles, apps, podcasts, videos, there are all kinds of resources and they’ve been vetted. And I’ll talk about that vetting in just a moment. So some people just start scrolling and anything that your organization offers, you might have your EAP system pop up here, or maybe you have a corporate relationship with a meditation app like Calm or an online therapy group. These things can all just be contextually linked too. But let’s take you into the self-care path quickly. One of the most popular buttons is what helps.

This is the list, folks. This is a lot of paddling, a lot of research under the water. If you’ve got anxiety, these are the things that... You can’t go Google this. This is what the science says that you can do that really works. And there are whatever, roughly 17 things here. I have a family member who’s had anxiety. I went over this list with them. Two things out of this list spoke to them. One is they didn’t realize that sleep made a big difference. And another was, we found out that playing music or listening to music can reduce anxiety. So very briefly you click on something like sleep. You can understand how sleep helps for anxiety, and you immediately have resources to help you do that. Maybe you’re looking for an app to help you go to sleep. Boom, here are top rated apps and off you go. I’ll click one and you get a description of it. It’s got a very high rating. Click and go.

So I gave you sort of a lot of words, but basically what I’m saying is in three clicks, you can choose a topic, choose an evidence-based approach or multiple, and then find vetted, high-quality resources that have been rated on a scale from zero to five stars using a combination of AI and human review. Every single resource gets human review. So people love that. I’m going to go back. I’m going to show you one more thing that you can do that’s super cool. And it’s the following. I showed you the what helps. The other thing people really like is how to personalize the results. We’re not all the same. Anxiety for a college student is a different issue than for a parent. I’m going to click parenting. So now I’m looking at resources that have been filtered that have to do with anxiety, but would help a parent.

Does my child have anxiety? Am I suffering from separation anxiety? And you can click. These are all carousels that open up into a list of dozens of resources. And around cultural issues, diversity and inclusion. We are embracing. Maybe you’re a person of color. And you want to hear from someone that is going through periods of anxiety, where their situation more closely mirrors yours. And you can filter by these kinds of things. So it’s a very powerful tool to help people get quickly to those best Ted talks, those best apps, those best online group forums to help them with their issue. Always knowing that if they want professional services, those float around and they can jump to those. Okay, I’m going to jump to one other thing very briefly, which is what if you don’t know that it’s anxiety that’s bothering you? What if you don’t feel great?

Well, we’ve got a whole library, in this platform, of assessments. These are what are called validated assessments. And most of them are quite short, two or three, four minutes. You answer a few questions. And people say, "Let’s destigmatize this help seeking," but they go right on using the same terms of mental health and what’s your diagnosis? We’re trying to lift people out of this. How deep is your sleep? Are your off days a sign of depression? Is it job stress or burnout? So we’re really trying to be engaging.

These kinds of things can be sent out in newsletters and other communications to draw people in. Trust me. People love learning about themselves if you keep it short and you give them feedback. They don’t want to give you information for you to have information. They want information for themselves. So you click on one of these, answer a few questions. You get a report. Is your risk level, high, low, or medium? And then customized for you, resources that you might find really helpful that have been vetted and are high quality. So this really helps the folks sort of find their way. Okay, let me jump out of sort of demonstration mode here.

Jen: That’s great.

Deryk: It’s exciting. It’s really fun. And I’m going to show you some outcomes.

Sadhna: I would like to add something. So when you’re looking at the website and the aggregated pages there, think about how much more powerful it is than doing a Google search on those things. Because when you do a Google search, you get so many websites, most of them are paid to advertise, that you might get steered wrong. This is all vetted. This is all very credible. Hence the name Credible. But it’s very helpful. When I looked at that whole conglomerate I’m like, "Wow." Each and every page of that is so meaningful and vetted that it’s going to help our people get the right care when they need it.

Jen: Great. Deryk, you touched on it a little bit, but can you talk for a moment about how the other mental health resources are promoted on the site and the places where people can see oh, I do have access to clinical services or online mental health and so forth.

Deryk: Well, basically, this is a whole database driven system. So what I mean by that is if someone says, "Yep, we want this for our population," we have a meeting and we say, "What resources do you have?" Now some people really don’t have anything and that’s okay because this system will work on its own, completely self-contained and maybe link to your EAP or the healthcare benefits that you offer. That would be sort of a very simple implementation if you will. Other people have corporate relationships that they’ve formed with, as I mentioned earlier, a meditation app or an online therapy group or something. All we need is to know what resources you have and what topics they relate to. So for example, if someone has online therapy, if they’re offering that, a psychological therapy, but someone is in the website looking at financial health, that doesn’t really make sense to bring up. That’s just going to waste their time. That’s not a good link. So you want linkages. If you’re looking at anxiety, online therapy is available. So that’s what I mean by database driven.

So you give us a list of what you have and what topics they’re related to. We have some forms we fill out, hit a button and throughout the site to answer your question. Jen, on the homepage, in each topic center, at the end of an assessment, we can pop up the resources that you have and they’re blended into what we offer. So you sort of are always available to you as the self-care track and the services that your organization offers track.

Jen: Yep. That’s great. And then part of what we’re doing with our collaboration with CredibleMind is helping align the promotion of those resources with what you have as well as what your strategy is. What do you actually want people to be using the most? Because you’ve done that research and you know what your audience needs. So there’s some really nice strategic connection points there that we’re really excited about.

Deryk: And I’ll expand on that. So this is just a summary for you folks, because I threw out a lot of numbers. There are over 240 topics. I know it sounds cavalier to say we cover essentially every topic associated with mental health. We have dozens and dozens of clients covering millions of lives and we ask them, "Are we missing any topics?" There aren’t any. If it’s stress due to wildfires, we’ve got that now. If it’s stress and anxiety around tornadoes in the Southeast, we’ve added that now. So we are really covering up to the moment of what’s going on. There are over 16,000 curated, vetted resources. Hundreds of these evidence-based approaches and all of this is being constantly maintained.

And it’s being adapted to people’s learning styles. This is not about writing up a two-page summary. Some people have a language barrier. So you got to make this available in different languages or maybe a video helps them understand because they can see it. Other people are more experiential and they need an interactive app. The point is we cover all of that stuff. Everything we do is scientifically validated. And as you’ve mentioned, Jen, what’s beautiful is we generate all this content, newsletters, blogs, all kinds of really valuable current information. And these can be now optimized within your communication challenges, the channels with Jen and her team to sort of pull people in. So we’ll get to that later. This system generates a tremendous amount of information. It’s all aggregated, deidentified. There’s no HIPAA challenge or big brother-ish here, but I’m going to again say something which is not terribly kind, but let’s make the point clear.

Most organizations we work with have been flying blind. They’re looking at claims data, that stuff that started manifesting five, 10 years ago. That’s what you’re seeing in claims data. This is how people are feeling today, this month. So what are the trends of what your population’s worried about? How is that benchmarking to other industries? What are the tools that your people are saying they want? I’ve seen companies go off and spend a lot of money building a relationship to get a meditation app only to find out that people in their organization, that’s not their preferred approach. There are different kinds of approaches to this. The key is there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s knowing your population and then seeing what they need and then feeding that to them at the appropriate times. That’s how you start solving the big challenge that Sadhna and Jen have been talking about.

Jen: Yeah. And that this is a piece that Sadhna and our clinical team was especially excited about. Sadhna, anything else you want to add?

Sadhna: Yeah, absolutely. Because we do have our own data analytics that we perform some kind of reporting and analytics around behavioral health. But CredibleMind brings next level logistics that we can incorporate into our own data mining effort as well. And all of our clients do ask for this. You will ask for this. If you have a program like a Lyra or TalkSpace, you want to know if they’re working or not. You want to know, are people really taking advantage of that? And because of that, how are they getting better? How are they coping with their things? And there are some data pieces that we can take from here to show you the progression. So yes, this is very, very helpful. Thank you.

Deryk: So this is really the last piece I just wanted to share today, which is what kinds of outcomes are we getting? I mean, what do users say about this? At the end of the day, we’re all trying to move the needle. We’re all well intentioned. We all have limited resources. So does this work? And the numbers are really pretty outstanding. Anywhere from 75 to 90% of users say that the system helps them understand their own mental health better. They refer this to a friend, those kinds of things. But the number that jumps out at me, the biggest, is third from the left there, is roughly three out of four saying that using the system improved their outlook and over half said that it’s led to a behavior change. Now I’ve studied behavior change. I teach this at Berkeley and this is an extraordinary number.

In fact, I share this almost with little humor. It’s too good. I mean, there must be a certain amount of a little self selection of the people answering the surveys because that’s how just off the chart it is. But the point is whatever the actual number is, it’s very good. People like this. It’s meeting them where they are in their journey and it’s helping them make decisions on their own or with their families and make positive change. And then as we’ve said, if they need more help, pass them through so that all of the EAP/healthcare benefits and other resources are made available to them.

Jen: I’ll mention a little bit more about how we’re combining this with our communication services and support. We’ve created a whole set and toolkit of sample communications that can be really quickly created and sent out, whether it’s over email or posted on your intranet or on your benefits website or text messages or postcards, so that a campaign can be created very, very quickly. And then we can watch and see how people are using the resources.

One of the things that we are big, big believers in is having barrier free access to critical benefits resources. We talk a lot about this on our blog and other webinars. It’s why we recommend that all organizations have a website that explains all of their benefits that’s outside of their firewall, without a password. And CredibleMind, the platform fits that perfectly. You just need the URL to access all of those resources that Deryk shared. So we can send it out. It’s really easy for people to access the platform, take advantage of it. They can share it with all of their family members, with all of their friends, their whole community. So it’s a very widely available resource, which makes it really exciting.

And then also very quick to implement. So one of the things that is also great, and we hear from a lot of our clients that their CEOs are saying, "Hey, you need to solve mental health today. Fix this now." We can’t have a 12 month implementation so we can get the platform customized and up very quickly. We’re talking a matter of weeks. The communication campaign up very quickly, a matter of weeks, following that same timeline. And then we have this really powerful platform that is providing all of those self care resources and pushing to the other clinical resources that you have in place. So this doesn’t replace any of those clinical offers. It doesn’t replace the need for covering therapy, very generously in your plan, design and so forth. It’s really getting to that self care population and then pushing to all of those other resources. Deryk and Sadhna, anything else you want to say on that topic?

Deryk: I’m just going to emphasize one point, which is, I think the position that you folks are in is so challenging because there are over 20,000 different apps and resources out there. What’s good? What’s not? And if you sort of play producer, you end up creating lists of lists and then your population gets confused. Where do I go for what? The most important thing I could say here, if you want engagement is you’ve got to have this idea of a no wrong door. That people on the left can move into this place where they’re going to find everything, anything you’ve already invested in. Plus all the topics that have been laid out to help them and then learn from that with analytics.

And I think that, plus taking that content and intelligently sending it out to people at the right times in their lives creates the engagement and the trust. This is creating trust because they’re getting answers. They’re not finding roadblocks. They’re getting real life answers. It’s working. You get word of mouth in your own organization. And then you’ve got positive statistics of those positive outcomes that I showed you to report back up to the C-suite. So I think this no wrong door is a big deal. Just wanted to emphasize it.

Sadhna: Your people, we have the tendency, if something is wrong, immediately go to a search engine like Google. But this is so much better than that. So we need to emphasize that in our communication campaign as well, that we tell our employees, "If you have a need in this space, go to this website, go to this aggregator or a navigator that will then help you get to the right resource." How many of you actually know what apps or CBT is? Cognitive behavioral therapy. How many of our people know what that means and whether they need it or not. Whether their child needs it or not.

So those are the kinds of things that we are trying to solve here by doing this CredibleMind introduced evidence based self-care. So you kind of get triaged to the right source, whether or not you actually have any of these benefits. So if you don’t have the benefits, like Lyra, they will direct you to something that’s vetted. So I don’t want to steal your thunder, Deryk, here, but that’s one other big advantage I see. That not all of our clients even have all of these programs. Some do, some don’t. If they do, they will go to the right source. But if they don’t, we still have some help for you, instead of going to Google.

Deryk: Quite frankly, Sadhna, that’s a very good point. Most of the organizations we work with really don’t have that many resources to connect to. That’s why I emphasize this is self contained. And you can find online therapy through this, if you want to let people do that. But anything that you’ve invested in trumps what you can connect people to. That’s first in place, if that’s what you want.

Sadhna: Absolutely.

Jen: Well, that’s great. We’ve covered a lot of ground and we have a lot of questions that have come in. So as we wrap up, we’d love to talk more with you. If other folks on your team weren’t able to join today, we’re happy to set up separate demos or individual conversations. We’re really excited about this platform and the ways that we’re going to be able to bring this to your people and their family. So our email addresses are on the screen. Please feel free to reach out to any of us individually for a follow up. And then we have a bunch of questions that have come in. So I’m going to look over to the Q and A. So the first one that has come in is, can you really talk about what it means for evidence based self care? What does that evidence based mean?

Deryk: Yeah, so there’s a lot. There are multiple levels to the evidence base. So let me just give you two or three examples. But what it means in a sentence is, that all of those things that I was showing the user journey, finding content, and what works, that each of those have been thought through from the standpoint of how does science inform that choice, that piece of information? So example, when we looked at anxiety, we looked at 17 different approaches. We didn’t look at 25. We didn’t look at three. There are 17 where the evidence today is if you’re sleeping better, this is strongly associated with reducing your level of anxiety, as an example of one. So that’s one example of evidence based. Creating evidence based paths that tell you if you do this and you do it well, sleep better, play music, Tai Chi, yoga, meditation, exercise, et cetera, that it will help for those given conditions.

All those things don’t work for any mental health condition. They work for a specific mental health condition. All right. That’s one level. But let’s go to a different one. The assessments. That’s evidence based from the standpoint of, if you answer these questions and you get a report and it says you’re low, medium, or high risk, well, that has to have been vetted across hundreds and hundreds of people that then are followed up with to see what their actual diagnoses are and their risk levels to know that when you answer those questions, that statistically you’re getting pretty good feedback. That’s another example of evidence based. So I can just sort of keep going, but all layers of the system are backed by science.

Jen: Great. Thank you. How does the platform assess the patient need to know what level of care or what the right resources are for them to access? Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of related, are there worries about the online programs not being paired with a medical professional?

Deryk: So I’ll take a crack at this and Sadhna, please add. I think on sort of the levels of care... It wasn’t me. I think it was Sadhna who mentioned earlier that one way to think about this system is it’s a giant triage engine. It’s not a very kind way of looking at it, but from a business perspective, it’s a very smart way of looking at it. And what I mean is you have a population of people that come in. Those that are fine, things that help them and get to the next step. I don’t know what therapy is. Tell me about that. Demystify it. Or maybe I’m going to exercise more to help reduce my depression. So roughly three out of four can sort of take care of themselves. That costs the system less. That’s really good news financially.

And roughly a quarter are likely to find their way through to, quote, an appropriate level of service. Now that level, that’s a whole nother discussion. Let’s not all jump to just therapy or medication because there’s peer to peer communication, there’s health coaching, there’s therapy, there is medication. So it’s really helping people. You can become quite sophisticated about the layers of the onion that you offer to people which have increasing benefit to the individual and increasing cost to the organization. So it’s a complex, very good question. Complex question. Short answer is the system supports whatever level of complexity you want.

Jen: The second question was, is there concern about people accessing online programs without a medical professional by their side?

Deryk: Well, people are already doing that. So let’s just be clear. People are doing that. They’re getting some good information and some really horrible and dangerous information. They’re just talking to friends. So there is everything from legal precedent to common sense is you want to make the best information available to people. And the proof is in the pudding. They’re saying that it’s helping and it’s helping them understand their issues. So no. I would say you have to be extremely careful. So if someone, for example, fills out an assessment around depression and they’re at high risk, you’ve got to have crisis lines there. You need to be very sensitive to the protocols around basic safety, mental health, and physical safety. That’s all built into the system too. I didn’t really spend time on that. So of course you need to be very mindful around what we’ll call certain sensitive mood disorders and mental health issues, but we are properly sensitive.

Sadhna: And I would like to add to that. You just mentioned, Deryk, that people are already doing that. They ask Dr. Google and then they’re sometimes getting really, really bad resources. And that’s what we try to avoid by going through here. There are so many good online apps out there that are all vetted. They do have actual psychiatrists and therapists that actually have designed the engine. And only then that information is sent to the patient.

So Better Health, TalkSpace, Lyra, some of the teledoc health and Amwell’s psychiatry tools. All of those are vetted. They are not just apps that are created by lay people. They are actually created by psychiatrists. The cognitive behavioral therapy tools that some of the websites have. And there are now Very Well Mind or they’re like a WebMD. They actually rate those best online therapy services based on who has the most medical professionals behind those. And those are the only ones, the vetted ones that you will see if you go through CredibleMinds. So it’s so much better than asking Dr. Google about what do I do about my condition? So that’s very important.

Jen: Yep. That’s great. A question about pricing. The question is, "This looks really valuable. Is it expensive and how does it compare to other programs in terms of price?"

Deryk: That’s pretty open ended. I would say this is very reasonably priced. I’m not sure how to characterize that, but this is such a fraction of any kind of a therapy approach as an example. So let me think for a minute. I don’t know if you want to characterize this. Why don’t you take that?

Jen: We were really surprised in a good way about how affordable it is when we got into that conversation, especially compared to all the other programs that you’re paying for and maybe not getting the right utilization of. We can very quickly price it out for anyone who’s interested. It’s based on the total population that you have. Very quick and easy for us to price it. If you want to talk more, email any of us. We can give you a rough price very, very easily. And it’s a rounding air for most of our clients in terms of how it compares to the overall expenses. So let’s get into a couple of the other questions. There’s several that have come in around benefits, well, around mental health and all of the topics around health equity. So can you speak a little bit about how mental health fits into the health equity conversation, and then talk a little bit more about the topics around race and identity and belonging that are covered on the platform?

Deryk: Yeah. So again, Sadhna I’ll lead off and please add as you would like. Let’s look at health equity for a moment and I think there’s a very, very positive movement going on that I am definitely seeing. I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago. I was giving a talk and the same question almost identically came up. So health equity is moving from what has been for many people, something you kind of do off to the side to something that’s really much more mainstream and central. Almost more of a guiding principle and a north star for organizations. Health equity is essentially the fair and just ability for any individual to attain their best health. Now that’s a pretty lofty goal. And when you think about that as health equity, which I think we all would agree, of course everyone should have the ability to go.

That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to get there, but they have to have a fair and just ability to get there. And so when you start with that, almost everything else that we talk about, mental health being one, is subordinate to that. It’s part of what makes it fair and equitable. So the short answer is this evidence based self care system for mental health is directly centered on helping improve health equity to the populations that you serve. Period. In fact, I’d say, if you’re not doing this, you’ve got a huge speed bump you’re working around because they need to help themselves. And as people evolve spiritually themselves, they’re that much more receptive to working well with others, which leads to race and diversity and belonging and inclusion. Which, I think of these issues and then I’m sharing this really a bit more personally, but these are the wounds that we have as an individual.

And as we begin to heal ourselves, these issues begin to fall away. They become just, it’s like snake skin that just gets shed. You can’t be a fully spiritually grown individual and carry some of the racism and some of the friction that people bring to the workplace and in society. So one, on a tangible basis, the website covers these topics. You learn from experts in the field that talk from different perspectives. There’s no preaching here. There are a range of perspectives there around these topics, but the north star here is I think we all are going after health equity. Mental health is a huge piece. Race and diversity and inclusion and belonging is a huge piece. We cover all of those topics. And I think it’s part of just creating a healthy workplace.

Sadhna: Yep. And I could just echo that. And what Deryk said is, in fact, if anything, this is going to improve your DEI initiatives because now people know that they have something that’s credible, reliable. By the way, great name, because I keep using the word credible, without it being CredibleMind. Credible, reliable, and very useful information that is vetted. So if anybody has concerns of any kind of a diversity related, inclusion related concerns, this is the first place they should be going to. And then it will be directed to the right websites. By the way, some of you may or may not know there are therapy groups for specific communities as well. So if we have those available, there is something called Pride Consulting, best for LGBTQI community. If that information is available through your subscription or not, we can make that available through CredibleMind as well. So it does actually help the DEI cause more than any other initiative, I would say.

Jen: That’s great. One more question about the platform. How frequently are the resources updated? And Deryk, you mentioned that things are very topical, whether it’s wildfires or tornadoes. What does the updating look like?

Deryk: So there’s just different kinds of content, right? And resources. So the resources I call it at the end of the rainbow, the apps, the videos, podcasts, online programs, articles, books, thought leaders, et cetera. They’re updated daily. That is a living knowledge base. There’s a constant rating going on. And those ratings move around. They don’t move around dramatically usually, but they move around. So there’s kind of that content. There’s the content we write. The summary of a topic and that’s what’s called peer review. And so there’s a whole sort of updating around that, which is so any content we generate is reviewed essentially annually. Certain topics are flagged for more continuous review.

And then there are things like blogs and newsletters, and those are very topical. And we react to what’s going on in the world. When the vaccines first came out, there were many groups that did not feel comfortable taking the vaccine. And we were writing blogs about that from the perspective of different groups. So for example, one blog that was very highly trafficked was one written by a woman. And the title was As a Woman of Color, Will I Take the Vaccine? That was a big deal in the very early days. Less so now. So those are the kinds of things. We’d have to make a stack rank, but continuously is the answer.

Jen: Great. That’s fantastic. Well, let’s wrap up. Again, thank you to everyone for joining. We are delighted to share all of this information. As you can tell, we’re really excited about the potential to pair CredibleMind with the consulting and health and compliance work that we’re doing with our clients all the time. We would love to talk with you more about it, share it with others on your team. And so please reach out. And Deryk and Sadhna, thank you so much for everything you shared today and all the time that you spent with us.

Deryk: Thanks for having me.

Sadhna: Thank you.

Deryk: Yeah. Bye everyone.

Jen: Thanks everyone. Have a great day.

Sadhna: Bye.