Happy Monday Hospitalogists! Today's special edition is a deep dive with the NeuroFlow team on how new suicide prevention tools hold game-changing potential to prevent crisis for families and find new ways to intervene upstream, helping payors and risk-bearing entities to identify suicide risk in populations. Let's dive in! This essay is a sponsored post in partnership with NeuroFlow. I write these posts for companies with offerings or missions I believe can provide value-adds for Hospitalogy subscribers, many of whom are health plans or risk-bearing entities looking to learn more about suicide prevention and how to understand behavioral health from a population health perspective. If you're interested in a sponsored deep dive, please reach out to Blake@workweek.com! |
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NeuroFlow: The Deep Costs of Suicide, and the Promise of Prevention |
Key Takeaways: Suicide Prevention and NeuroFlow |
- The behavioral health crisis in America is real, massive, and continues to grow.
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- Within serious mental illness (SMI), suicide rates are rising at an alarming rate.
- For fear of stating the obvious, suicide causes enormous societal harm, and its impact is impossible to quantify for families who are dealing with it or have been through it.
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- But today, it's difficult to identify at-risk individuals.
- Here's the GOOD news and why I'm writing about this today. This dynamic around suicide is changing for the better, and will continue to do so. People are talking about it. SMI and suicide prevention are receiving major investment. And new software tools leveraging AI are equipping caregivers, providers, and payors alike.
- From a population health standpoint, identifying at-risk individuals helps to support families, first and foremost. Further, ANY health condition that goes undetected results in material costs downstream for risk-bearing organizations. Suicide is a costly one in multiple, obvious ways.
- NeuroFlow screens populations in real-time, leveraging both humans on the ground, AI, and a user-friendly analytics platform to identify suicide risk, with the goal of shifting the tides of the suicide epidemic for good. NeuroFlow has set out to end this crisis plaguing families across America while also supporting payors and health systems engaged in population health.
- Learn more about NeuroFlow and get in touch with them here!
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The Behavioral Health Crisis: Our Challenges Today |
We all talk about the rampant need for behavioral health services, but to see it quantified, like I did for this piece with NeuroFlow, is sobering. To be honest, I struggled a bit writing this essay. Because it's tough to talk about the economic, business case for addressing those affected by suicide simply because this issue is so deeply personal, and it's hard to carry the conversation beyond one of support - to focus on numbers and data - without being seen as insensitive. To untwine business and personal on such a sensitive topic is difficult, and it's also one reason why payors have been slow to address it. But this lethargy and inertia is a mistake, because people are suffering, and abundant opportunity exists to intervene at multiple stages to prevent suicide and other upstream costs. I want to be clear, and to make my posture known from the beginning: the underlying economic benefit to payors from identifying and preventing suicidal ideation upstream comes in so far behind the benefits to society and families at large. But to find business success in suicide prevention also means another brother saved. A medical resident identified. Someone who is struggling gets the help they need. Therefore, aligning societal and business/economic impacts here is a total win-win. With that backdrop, I'm here to talk more about the clear, identified business need - and economic advantage - for payors and other risk-bearing providers to understand this population better and find ways to prevent suicide. I also am here to share NeuroFlow's vision and desire to drive the death by suicide number to zero. |
Suicide risk encompasses a much larger population than you might realize. From data sourced through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, here are some staggering numbers for you to consider. In 2022: - 13,200,000 adults have had serious suicidal thoughts
- 3,800,000 adults made material plans
- 1,600,000 attempted to commit suicide. 75% of those attempts were planned, while 25% were unplanned.
Those numbers have stuck with me. It's hard to write out. In 2022 alone, the U.S experienced over 49,000 deaths by suicide. Look at the upstream cost and utilization impact of deaths by suicide on our healthcare system: |
The upward trend needs to change, and a potential avenue to do so lies within payor and risk-bearing populations. |
The numbers are scary. So, why am I optimistic? The suicide number is growing, but things are changing. As our healthcare system moves toward a value-based future, as prevention and scalable population health screening grows in prevalence, and as behavioral health integrates deeper into primary care, we can make a significant dent in preventing suicide.
You might view the 'iceberg' graphic above as negative. No - it's overwhelmingly positive and should be a source of hope! If the numbers tell us anything, they are showing an incredible number of junctures and opportunities to intervene with an individual prior to a crisis. And if we have the right infrastructure in place - mechanisms to support, screen, and intervene, these processes can make all the difference.
I love this flow chart below NeuroFlow put together, because it shows the remarkable life-saving opportunities this level of support can have on a patient's journey in dealing with suicidal ideation: |
Payors and risk-bearing entities who don't have this level of sophisticated tooling or infrastructure need to understand how exposed they are to individuals affected by suicide. (NeuroFlow has developed a calculator linked here to help risk-bearing orgs understand this risk at a high level) Simply put, as is the case with most other preventive measures in healthcare, rampant opportunities exist to intervene before serious mental illness festers into something far greater, and uncontrollable. As a data point, medical costs stemming from suicide injury and the cost of medical care as a result of adverse affects of those injuries exceeded $4.7 billion in 2022, according to the CDC. Further, many of these patients actively receive healthcare services in the months or year leading up to death by suicide. But it's tough. People don't know how or when to bring up issues with their PCPs. And assessments are far from perfect. |
The Evolving World of Suicide Prevention - Why There's Hope for a Better Tomorrow with NeuroFlow |
With the right investment in the right resources, screenings, and programs, we can develop tools, identify patterns in behavior, intervene in the appropriate way for that patient, and prevent suicide in a real, significant way. It's so tough to combat rising suicide rates because it's challenging to find who needs help, and when they need support. It's not about putting the suicide prevention hotline at the end of a TV show. It's about delivering tangible, life-saving results for patients. Historically, risk-bearing entities have tip-toed around the topic of suicide. It's tough to talk about. This is the hairy problem NeuroFlow is trying to solve ASAP with payors, ACOs, and others. Using tech to solve problems - in this case, a really important one in suicide prevention - upstream, to both save lives and deliver material savings to our healthcare system. Win-win. They've partnered with Prudential, found success with Centene's Magellan Health, and most recently launched a partnership with forward thinking value-based care and population health focused health system Intermountain to proactively screen behavioral health risks within Intermountain's primary care populations. In 2023 alone, NeuroFlow's data capture and triage tools alerted its clients to 33,000 individuals at risk of suicide, while screening across 15 million lives currently under contract. Alarmingly, most risk-bearing organizations don't have the infrastructure to address or intervene when suicidal ideation is identified in their populations. This juncture is where NeuroFlow slots in and also addresses any liability concerns for payors and providers. NeuroFlow's trained Response Services team connects humans with patients in crisis or at the highest risk in real-time, providing live support when needed. Along with the buzzwordy AI and analytics stuff, NeuroFlow relies on its Response Services team as a core differentiator (humans in the loop!), another layer of redundancy, and is a key part of the team's ability to identify suicide risk. These professionals are trained in crisis management for individuals indicating suicidal ideation, resulting in needed, timely intervention for those who need it the most. NeuroFlow offers a better path forward for suicide prevention. Their platform and user-friendly dashboard allows health plans and health systems to accurately predict population risk in real time and optimize care programs with the ultimate goal of lowering total cost of care. 58% of people who were flagged for suicidal ideation through NeuroFlow's natural language processing (NLP) technology may not have been identified otherwise. It's exciting to see NeuroFlow make headway into new partnerships with the teams and products they've put together, and I'm looking forward to seeing the organization continue to support a population that needs this level of attention. |
How to Learn More about NeuroFlow and Suicide Prevention |
That's all I have for you guys on a heavier topic for Hospitalogy! Hopefully you found this piece informative and learned about the important work NeuroFlow is doing in this realm of suicide prevention.
For those interested, learn more about NeuroFlow's platform and population health screening tools here. Like I mentioned, they work with payors, health systems, and any risk-bearing org looking to understand more about their behavioral health population. | |
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Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email. — Blake |
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