The Stand-Alone Mental Health App Is a Dead End

Healthcare doesn’t need more fragmentation; the best solutions will drive connection.

You will find over 41,000 apps when searching for “healthcare” in the Apple or Android app store. Drill down to “mental health,” and you will still find over 10,000 apps. Patients, providers, and payors are inundated with technology, and, no matter how well intended, they simply do not need another ‘app’—let alone another mental health app.

What We’re Not: A Point Solution Mental Health App

Healthcare leaders are frustrated with the fragmentation caused by point solution mental health apps, particularly those with little to no evidence base. These solutions stand alone, failing to feed critical health data back to care teams and lacking the flexibility to support individuals as their health needs change. That’s led to greater consolidation and more rigorous validation of solutions.

We understand this at NeuroFlow, which is why we didn’t build just another app. Unfortunately the saturation of mental health apps has led some health systems and payors to inaccurately lump us into that group. It seems fitting that in the New Year, we reintroduce ourselves to the healthcare industry as not just an app, but an enabling technology. NeuroFlow provides critical infrastructure to organizations, helping them provide behavioral health solutions and care integration at scale to their members and patients. Our goal is to enable holistic care so that physical and behavioral health can be treated together. We are not and never will be a single point mental health solution—a dead end solution.

What We Are: A Behavioral Health Infrastructure Solution

In fairness, NeuroFlow does have a (award winning!) mobile and web app offering, but its real value comes from its connection to our broader platform. The NeuroFlow app is merely a feature of the infrastructure we provide to our healthcare partners. Because our platform is configurable, we can integrate into our partners’ existing front-end experiences with secure API integrations instead of using the NeuroFlow app.

In addition to the clinical assessments and evidence-based behavioral health content that the app experience delivers, NeuroFlow provides a care management dashboard where clinical users can track behavioral health risk and triage individuals across a population, based on insights from NeuroFlow’s engagement channels or partners’ existing data sources, including email, SMS, or in-person assessments. Partners receive timely visibility into well-being declines through alerts, helping care teams intervene before individuals reach crisis. For high and rising risk individuals, NeuroFlow can also facilitate high-touch behavioral health support through Response Services—a team staffed by crisis professionals who contact at-risk individuals and connect them to crisis resources.

This population-wide insight has several use cases. Our partners leverage NeuroFlow’s platform to identify suicide risk and more effectively deploy resources, improve care management efficiency among higher risk populations, and find individuals who would benefit from collaborative care and provide targeted resources to support their recovery.

These distinctions may seem trivial at first, but there is an important reason to highlight them: when everything is grouped together as ‘just another app’ there is a substantial risk of missing out on critical features that can benefit providers, payors, and individuals. Inflating the use of ‘app’ can cause confusion around business models, data security, and clinical evidence.

This is not unique to NeuroFlow, either. There are complex, powerful platforms across our healthcare system that may have an app-component, and they too, fall erroneously into the ‘healthcare app’ category.

NeuroFlow Vs. Stand-Alone Mental Health Apps

Because I can speak most intelligently to NeuroFlow, here are some key differences that demonstrate how NeuroFlow’s platform delivers scale and infrastructure beyond a single app:

Enhancing Provider & Payor Integrated Behavioral Health Programs

There are plenty of mental health apps available that provide value and there’s a growing, positive effort to highlight the efficacy and impact of these tools by independent bodies. However, rather than throw more tools at our already burdened healthcare industry, it’s time to provide scalable, configurable, and secure infrastructure to health systems and payors. The best mental health solutions won’t replace health systems’ or payors’ technology, but enhance them. That’s the future NeuroFlow is delivering to the healthcare industry in 2023.

Head to our website or request a demo to learn how we can enhance your behavioral health programs this year and beyond.