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Text therapy and virtual clinicians are
becoming more prevalent, delivering
treatment in new, easier-to-access ways.
Behind these innovations are big data
sets that are transforming how mental
health treatment is executed. According
to some mental health experts, this
data-driven therapy can be more accessible,
accountable, and result in better
patient treatment.
CBT 2.0
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a
skills-based approach to treatment, typically
delivered in a short course of six to
eight weeks. In these sessions, a therapist
will identify patients’ triggers and provide
them with the tools to remodel the way
they think or behave.
While CBT is one of the most widely
used forms of therapy, in practice, only
about half of the patients achieve full
recovery. More than half of CBT users
relapsed within 12 months, according to
a 2017 study by the University of York
in the U.K. published in the Journal of
Behaviour Research and Therapy.
“In general, we don’t have a very good
system of quantifying the effectiveness
of mental health treatment,” says Ashley
Womble, author of Everything Is Going
to Be OK, a book about living with mental
illness. “Unlike medical interventions,
there are no blood tests that can measure
the success of therapy.”
That’s where data comes in.
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Ieso Digital Health is a platform that
provides CBT via a text-based online
conversation between a therapist and
the patient in a secure virtual therapy
room. Commonly known as text therapy,
a number of other companies, including
BetterHelp and Talkspace, offer a similar
service.
By the end of 2018, Ieso had treated
30,000 patients and logged 180,000 hours
of therapy. Using anonymized data from
the text conversations, the company has
been able to improve recovery rates for
its patients.
“It was through the data that we discovered
that individual therapists can get
into the 80 percent recovery rate,” says
Valentin Tablan, senior vice president of
artificial intelligence (AI) at Ieso.
By running more than 90,000 hours of
therapy through a deep learning model,
Ieso has been able to correlate when a
therapist delivers a certain type of content
in a session with an improvement in
the symptoms of the patient.
For example, Ieso’s data analysis has
shown that recovery rates are likely to
increase if the patient has been given
homework, such as mindfulness exercises
to practice, by his or her therapist, or if
the two of them have set an agenda together.
“The patient needs to be involved
in [his or her] own recovery,” Tablan says.
THERAPY FOR ALL
In 2018, information gathered through Ieso’s
dataset was used in a landmark study
published in the British Journal of Psychiatry
Open that found technology-enabled
treatment delivery facilitates access to