Consumer-Therapist-Connector: Increasing Access to Quality Behavioral Healthcare

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ABSTRACT The United States is experiencing a major mental health crisis. Per recent reports in the New York Times and The Washington Post, the gap between need and access to behavioral health services is rapidly increasing. There is an urgent need to solve both the access and quality problems with behavioral healthcare. With COVID and other stressors, 76% of surveyed employees are reporting at least one significant behavioral health symptom and 27% believe their employer is not doing enough to assist their family with their anxiety, depression, and other behavioral health issues. Another report indicated that adults are on wait lists for 3+ months to receive outpatient therapy in Massachusetts. There simply are not enough therapists to meet the growing demand and waiting lists are long and growing. On the quality side, more than 60% of patients find no meaningful benefit from the treatment they receive. We have already created a system that dramatically improved the quality problem in a randomized clinical trial: this referral process roughly doubled network outcomes for the primary referral channel for the Cleveland Clinic, improving outcomes compared to a control group where cases were assigned based on therapists self-perceived strengths. In the current application we aim to solve the access problem by developing Consumer-Therapist-Connector. This innovative online tool will expeditiously connect patients with well-matched therapists for traditional therapy by distance search, or telemedicine by state or national searches. What distinguishes our solution from other online find-a-therapist systems is that the patient can be easily added to the waitlist of all empirically well-matched providers, which increases the likelihood they will connect quickly with a good-fitting therapist. It will alleviate the growing anguish patients encounter when calling numerous providers only to learn that their practices are full. At the same time, these waiting lists will dramatically increase the opportunity to use our proven matching technology to simultaneously improve quality, encouraging consumers and providers to offer and accept appointments only when a match is likely to greatly benefit the patient.