IBM Watson Health, ODH Partner on Health Management

Behavioral health analytics specialist ODH and IBM Watson Health announced the launch of population health management platform Mentrics, built for managed care organizations that handle behavioral health benefits.

Mentrics is the result of four years of collaboration between IBM and ODH to design a technology solution to transform the management of behavioral health care, said ODH President and CEO Michael Jarjour. The platform aggregates healthcare data from multiple sources such as behavioral and physical medical services and prescription claims into a single platform to provide better quality patient care and improve outcomes, according to the company.

Mentrics can be deployed in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model on IBM’s Watson Health Cloud, and can integrate with an organization’s existing infrastructure and storage capacity.

Mentrics enables users to access broader data on the Watson Health Cloud, to enable deeper insights for patient care, such as similarity analytics.

Mentrics can assign a behavioral and physical health risk score for each individual, providing immediate actionable insights that alert care coordinators to treatment gaps or inconsistencies.

“ODH approached IBM about four years ago because they saw the potential for IBM technologies to help address some of the greatest gaps in the mental health industry,” Lauren O’Donnell, vice president of Life Sciences for IBM Watson Health. “They saw the work we were doing to leverage data for predictive insights and care coordination, and they saw the power of our global organization to innovate and create new tools for care providers.

“Our research and development teams iterated over several years through experiments with a variety of strategies to aggregate and analyze data from multiple siloed entities,” O’Donnell continued. “We are actively working with managed care organizations and behavioral health organizations who are responsible for the health of populations with behavioral health conditions, and we hope to roll out Mentrics for the first time very soon.”

Mentrics features 22 dimensions to enable providers to create customized, clinically meaningful population segments. According to ODH, Mentrics features the only commercially available model for behavioral health-specific risk stratification.

“In the mental health industry, care providers and population health managers face pervasive fragmentation of care and the data systems that guide and manage that care,” O’Donnell said. “This fragmentation can lead to poor outcomes for patients, which puts an even greater burden on mental health systems that are already incredibly resource constrained. As we begin to tap into the growing body of data being created daily, we think we can make significant strides to improve the quality of care and better coordinate care for people who have behavioral health conditions.”