Article Excerpt: As some states try to regulate children’s social media use and TikTok emerges as a geopolitical chew toy, a new clearinghouse has emerged for mediating between tech companies and those concerned about their products’ impact on kids: the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/bdahr353
Article Source: Axios
Article Excerpt: This segment features Will Torrey, MD, Chair, Department of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Health, Holly A. Stevens, Esq., Director of Public Policy, National Alliance on Mental Health, New Hampshire chapter (NAMI NH), and Matthew Houde, JD, Vice President of Government Relations, Dartmouth Health. Together, they discuss the current state of the mental health system in New Hampshire and the country, and areas of federal and state public policy that can be improved. Torrey said the biggest difficulty facing residents and providers is timely access to high-quality care. “The demand for services, the need for services, just far outstrips the state’s capacity to offer those needed services. If you develop cancer, heart disease or an orthopedic injury, you can get into outpatient or inpatient treatment in a timely manner. But that’s just not true for psychiatric illnesses,” Torrey said
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/v5w3cjh9
Article Source: Dartmouth Health News
Article Excerpt: New legislation would allow for reimbursement of prescribed digital therapeutics under Medicare, which proponents argue could increase access to these emerging treatments. Still, others say it’s new technology, and the wrong reimbursement model could tamper innovation and increase patient costs. The Access to Prescription Digital Therapeutics Act of 2022, introduced in the U.S. Senate in March, aims to amend the Social Security Act to provide Medicare coverage and reimbursement for prescription digital therapeutics.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/464yhtr7
Article Source: MobiHealthNews
Article Excerpt: In this first chapter, the book’s editors Jacobson, Kowatsch and Marsch “introduce a comprehensive overview of the field of digital therapeutics and research on their efficacy, effectiveness, scalability, and cost-effectiveness (pp. 1).” The authors are looking to introduce the topic of digital therapeutics to a broad audience and designed this book for people without a background in mental health or substance use. The authors’ vision includes conveying how advancements in technology can be leveraged to increase the effectiveness of interventions. Topics relating to structural considerations include the design of interventions, cultural adaptations, regulation, and data privacy.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/56jdnyae
Article Source: Centre for Digital Health Interventions News
Article Excerpt: Nearly 175 people representing the digital health and pharmaceutical industries, health care systems, clinicians, scientists, investors, Dartmouth students and faculty, and government officials representing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gathered on Dartmouth’s campus November 2 for daylong discussions centered on digital therapeutics. Hosted by Geisel School of Medicine’s Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) and Dartmouth’s Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, the program provided an overview of the science and clinical practice of digital therapeutics, the current and anticipated paths to their global deployment, and a vision for the future. This is the first time these groups have come together in conversations hosted by an academic institution about the digital health landscape and may well be viewed as a seminal moment in the rapidly developing field.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/2fnhbyxa
Article Source: Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine News
Article Excerpt: Expanding telehealth services for opioid use disorder (OUD) can help keep patients in treatment longer and reduce risks of overdosing. The findings were part of a new study that compared telehealth usage for 105,240 OUD patients before the COVID-19 pandemic and for 70,538 who began treatment during the pandemic. At that time, federal regulators supported broader use of telehealth services and relaxed policies on prescribing methadone and buprenorphine for OUD treatment, said the study published Aug. 31 in JAMA Psychiatry.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/yeyjntd3
Article Source: Medical Economics
Article Excerpt: While Covid-19’s death toll grabbed the spotlight these past two years, another epidemic continued marching grimly onward in America: deaths from opioid overdose. A record 68,630 individuals died from opioid overdoses in 2020, partly as a result of the isolation and social distancing forced by the pandemic; early data suggest that death rates in many states were even worse in the first half of 2021. But the coronavirus pandemic may also have had a paradoxical benefit for those addicted to opioids: Because Covid-19 made in-person health care unsafe, US telehealth regulations were relaxed so that more services — including addiction treatment — could be provided online. As a result, people with opioid use disorder are accessing medication and support across the country in greater numbers than ever before. While it’s too soon to know for sure whether this helps more people kick their addiction, early signs are promising.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/ae7ytv7v
Article Source: Knowable Magazine
Article Excerpt: The Biden Administration is encouraging new digital therapeutics reimbursement strategies in both the public and private sector as part of its National Drug Control Strategy report. In the plan the White House pitches digital therapeutics, evidence-based treatments delivered through software interventions to treat or manage a condition, as a potential tool to help expand access to substance use disorder (SUD) treatments. The reimbursement plans, which was first spotted by Exits and Outcomes, was part of a larger plan to tackle substance use disorders.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/mr82ered
Article Source: Behavioral Health Business
Article Excerpt: Chronic pain is generally defined as pain that has lasted three months or longer. It is one of the leading causes of long-term disability in the world. By some measures, 50 million Americans live with chronic pain, in part because the power of medicine to relieve pain remains woefully inadequate. As Daniel Clauw, who runs the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center at the University of Michigan, put it in a 2019 lecture, there isn’t “any drug in any chronic-pain state that works in better than one out of three people.” He went on to say that nonpharmacological therapy should instead be “front and center in managing chronic pain — rather than opioids, or for that matter, any of our drugs.”Virtual reality is emerging as an unlikely tool for solving this intractable problem. The V.R. segment in health care alone, which according to some estimates is already valued at billions of dollars, is expected to grow by multiples of that in the next few years, with researchers seeing potential for it to help with everything from anxiety and depression to rehabilitation after strokes to surgeons strategizing where they will cut and stitch. In November, the Food and Drug Administration gave authorization for the first V.R. product to be marketed for the treatment of chronic pain.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/3wkx6p8z
Article Source: The New York Times Magazine