Dr Ben Buchanan is a psychologist and Co-founder & Director of NovoPsych, an Australian healthtech company providing software for administering psychological, remote and online questionnaires to patients. As a trained clinical psychologist, Ben is passionate about clinicians evaluating their own practice through the use of routine outcome monitoring, which is why he created NovoPsych.
In this episode, Ben explains why outcome measurements should focus on Australian requirements, and how the recent and sudden transformation towards telehealth can be easily adapted to using NovoPsych. Ben provides some guidance on what a telehealth workflow could look like, and how to implement automation with remote symptom monitoring of patients between visits or after treatment.
Key takeaways:
- In Australia, one of the most widely used assessments to measure mental health outcomes is called the K10 — also known as the ‘Kessler Psychological Distress Scale’. Australia regulations of mental health practitioners require some outcome monitoring to occur. NovoPsych has been tailored to fit the exact purpose that Australian mental health conditions need.
- Healthcare is a service industry, in which it’s just as important to provide a service that the client is happy with as it is to improve clinical outcomes.
- One of the number one predictors of treatment success for mental health patients is the ‘therapeutic alliance’, i.e. the relationship between the psychologist and the client. If the client trusts the psychologist then that is a serious predictor of later outcomes.
- Practitioners often have to rely on their intuition to get a sense about whether the client is benefitting from the treatment. However, the research evidence shows that trained professionals are terrible at using intuition to accurately measure how their clients are going.
- Within NovoPsych there are therapeutic alliance measures that can tell the psychologist from the get-go whether they’re reaching their client or not, so adjustments can be made in the early stages of treatment.
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