Ginger.io, the leading digital mental health solution, announced the Utah SmartCare, touting it as a next-generation care management project designed to improve patient engagement and health outcomes in low-income Utah populations. The project is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a private business venture (Ginger.io), public service organizations (Association for Utah Community Health – AUCH) and a nonprofit foundation (Cambia Health Foundation).
Funded by the Cambia Health Foundation, Utah SmartCare focuses on improving care for high-cost patients suffering from serious mental illness (SMI), generalized anxiety and generalized depression, in conjunction with a serious physical health condition such as diabetes or heart disease. The initiative will focus on serving low-income patients living at or below 200% of Federal Poverty Guidelines who are Medicaid beneficiaries or are uninsured.
“Up until this point, we haven’t had the technology to effectively measure how patients are feeling outside of a care setting,” said Dr. Anmol Madan, Co-Founder and CEO of Ginger.io. “Now that this remote data is more readily available, we are integrating it with the existing healthcare system and using it to deliver the sort of personalized outreach that improves care for patients and drives down costs, both of which substantially benefit the entire system.”
Utah SmartCare is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a private business venture, public service organizations and a nonprofit foundation.Under the deal, five sites will be using Ginger.io’s technology platform to integrate primary care with mental health services. One of them, Wasatch Mental Health, will use the technology in a crisis center capacity to better manage patients in the acute phase of their behavioral health condition. Another site, Health Connections at Weber Human Services, is integrating the Ginger.io technology into existing workflows to support and improve the outreach of current case managers on staff.
In the past, integrating primary care with behavioral health delivery has proven an effective yet elusive method of treating patients with mental health conditions, Dr. Madan added.