As we look toward 2025, what can employers look forward to in advances in mental health care? Behavioral Health Tech founder and CEO Solome Tibebu recently hosted a webinar with Dr. Chris Mosunic, Calm chief clinical officer, and Sara Pierce, senior vice president and chief business officer at Magellan Health, to explore this question. Following are highlights from “The Future of Mental Health: Personalizing Care Across a Broad Set of Health Conditions.”
5 takeaways from “The Future of Mental Health”
1. Specialized mental health care at scale is key
As a concept, whole-person health is catching on. People are broadly aware of, and understand, the mind-body connection and the need to connect mental and physical health care. Unfortunately, solutions to bring the concept to life have been lagging, according to Mosunic.
“Right now, our standard of care in whole health is giving a referral,” said Mosunic. “If you have cancer, you get a mental health referral because there’s going to be a mental health issue to work through.
“What we’re missing is that the providers on the mental health side who you get the referral to aren’t necessarily specialists in cancer.” If the provider is a generally trained therapist, they could “say something horrific” or be “toxically positive,” Mosunic added.
The good news is there are providers with specialized expertise who bridge the mental and physical sides of conditions, he said. “For instance, there are clinical psychologists who are stationed, as their career, within the oncology unit, and they know stages of cancer and different things that would be pertinent to a person with cancer.”
It’s a matter of finding those experts and getting their messaging to the masses, Mosunic explained. “With Calm Health, we’re trying to find those experts and help people understand that there’s expertise for their specific situation.”
Calm Health now has 40 clinical programs developed by psychologists with subject matter expertise in the mental health issues associated with specific chronic conditions, such as cancer, hypertension, and diabetes; life experiences such as divorce and caregiving; and occupations in health care, the military, teaching, and others.
2. Evidence-based care must be the new quality standard for mental health care
When you have an ear infection, you can expect to receive a prescription for antibiotics. When it comes to mental health care, however, people don’t know what to expect in terms of quality care, Mosunic explained. It’s important to establish evidence-based mental health care as the quality standard.
Quality mental health care isn’t about recording providers and telling them what they did wrong, said Mosunic. “The answer is having the consumer—the patient—understand what the best experience looks like and start to have that standard play out.”
A patient should be able to expect that filling out a questionnaire for their provider is good for them, good for the provider, and good for the payer—that the whole system is going to work better together, Mosunic explained. “With Calm Health, we’re trying to move the entire system in a way where people start looking at mental health in a more evidence-based manner.”
3. Digital ecosystems and longitudinal apps extend reach and drive engagement
Digital technology opens up new opportunities for mental health organizations to partner with others to solve problems, said Pierce. “By finding partners that are deep in a specific area that we want to address, we extend our reach and get deeper in our ability to do that.”
Magellan Health recently partnered with Be Me, a company that specializes in supporting teenagers, Pierce said. “They’re digital natives, and they have [access to] an amazing set of tools and resources, and humans to professionally assist them . . . to address things that teenagers are working through. We’re always looking to understand where [digital technology] can play and where it’s appropriate for it to hand off to another mode as well.”
Digital mental health apps meet teens where they are—on their phones—which helps to break through the stigma. But the challenge is to make sure they keep coming back, said Mosunic. It’s not enough to simply create a digital app. “It needs to be longitudinal to solve the access issue.”
Calm and Calm Health apps bring users back by offering a wide range of content and formats designed to meet a wide range of needs, from a 30-second breathing exercise or 30-minute meditation to music, movement, or a Sleep Story. In the case of Calm Health, when a user has a specific need that Calm doesn’t specialize in, they can be guided to an appropriate resource from a partner.
“For example, Magellan’s known for how good they are with autism,” said Mosunic. “If a person on the Calm Health app is struggling with autism, we want to be able to send them to Magellan, because those are the people filling the gap, and people don’t even know that exists or that they have that benefit. That’s the type of ecosystem that I think is the evolution of where mental health is going and especially whole health is going.”
4. When selecting whole-health solutions, ask the right questions and rely on the expertise of trusted brokers and health plans
In selecting solutions for promoting whole health, Pierce recommended starting with some internal research on your population. “When I think about an employer group—what are the social determinants of health that are impacting your employee population most greatly, and that might vary in different markets? Whether it’s manufacturing, health care, retail, restaurant service industries, education—what’s popping for your population might be different and might influence what the priorities are around a whole-person orientation.”
Mosunic emphasized the benefits of relying on your broker or your health plan. “If you’re lucky enough to have an excellent broker or a health plan that you’re familiar with, they do the deepest vetting . . . . There are all these companies out there, and they all have similar pitch decks of all the great things they’re going to do. The idea that you’re going to be able to vet all these companies and do the diligence that it takes to understand what’s truly going on under the hood—it’s really not likely unless you have an amazing team of clinicians who can go under the hood and really look.”
Mosunic also recommended making sure a solution is scalable and evidence based. “If you’re looking at solutions that are in the wellness or subclinical mild range, how do I get these out there to everybody so they’re using them in a way that’s evidence based? If it’s not evidence based, it’s going to lose funding; it’s going to go out. So again, if you can, let your health plan be the vetter of the solutions that you go through.”
5. In five years, we could have greater parity between mental and physical health care
Asked what the next five years will bring in mental health care, Mosunic talked about seeing greater parity between mental health and physical health.
For example, today you can use ChatGPT to check a physical health diagnosis by plugging in all your symptoms. AI has allowed people a voice when they get a diagnosis they don’t agree with, a kind of second opinion.
“In mental health, we don’t have anything like that,” said Mosunic. “Quite often you go talk to somebody for 90 minutes and they give you a diagnosis without all the data points to really confirm that diagnosis, because they didn’t ask you to spend three hours answering questionnaires [which is usually necessary to thoroughly come up with the most precise diagnosis]. Being able to move that entire world online, so that AI can sift through data and give consumers the ability to double check and feel confident in their diagnosis, there are a lot of great companies working on this.
“And I think that’s going to be here in five years, and I think it’s going to be amazing, because I think it’s going to help people with really complex situations.”
You can watch the webinar in its entirety here. And for more information on proactively supporting employee mental health and well-being, check out our pricing or connect with a Calm specialist today.
