Digital Tools For Better Mental Health And Resilience with Deryk Van Brunt, CEO and co-founder of CredibleMind

[00:00:02] Hey everybody, welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket. Here we are at AHIP 2024 in Las Vegas in the amazing Wynn Hotel. Today I have the privilege of hosting Deryk Van Brunt with us. He is the co-founder and CEO of CredibleMind. Deryk, thanks for joining us today. Great to

[00:00:23] meet you Saul. It's so great to meet you. It was great to be with you and the team yesterday at the booth inside of the expo. I was fascinated by what you guys are up to.

[00:00:31] We're going to share this with everybody listening and watching. But to begin with, Deryk, tell us about you and how you got into this business. California guy. I teach at UC Berkeley in the School of Public Health. How do we use technology

[00:00:44] to improve the health of populations? So that's helping clinical teams, communities, and individuals make good decisions. And that's what really spurred the development of this company, CredibleMind, with a deep interest in the areas of mental health. My wife is a therapist and

[00:00:59] she's been helping people through mental health issues her whole career. And so when I sold my last company, I'm a serial entrepreneur. Cool said we got to do something to make mental health a

[00:01:08] little bit more accessible and work here in the U.S. That's pretty awesome. What was your last company? It was called Healthy Communities Institute. Still is. It was bought by Xerox and it helped communities get dashboards of all the different kinds of quality of life information

[00:01:22] in one place so you could make sense of it. That's fascinating. It sounds like it could even be a good application and kind of social determinants of health. That was a big part of it.

[00:01:30] Yeah, very cool. Very cool. I love it. You're injecting your innovative mind into a space that really needs it. That's mental health. Yeah. Talk to us about CredibleMind and the work that you guys do. Yeah, we're in a national mental health crisis. The rates of depression, anxiety, burnout,

[00:01:48] suicide, they're all up much higher than they were pre the pandemic. And the rates are already going up when the pandemic started. And then it just that was like picking the hornets nest, right? All of

[00:01:59] a sudden mental health challenges really escalated. So what we've done is we've built a digital mental health platform. So it's a set of technology. It's got three products on it. Evidence-based self-care

[00:02:10] for mental health. So what can people do on their own to feel better? And then there's a whole screening tool to help people that do want professional services like therapy and medication

[00:02:22] find out where to go, what's right for them based on their own risks and their interests. Are you interested in online therapy or do you want to sit down next to somebody? That kind of thing. Yeah.

[00:02:29] And then the third thing is really important. It's very exciting. We're announcing it here at the show. It launches in August and we're basically helping lead the charge of reframing the whole mental health field, which is by nature of our language, a negative framework, right? It's what

[00:02:46] condition do you have? How do you get better? How do you somehow get back to baseline? And instilling instead of view towards flourishing, if you want to think of it as happiness, how do you help people

[00:02:56] become happy? And in the course of doing that, you build resilience. So those are the three products on the platform and we work with payers and providers and universities and many organizations. That's fantastic. A wide array of entry points, ultimately with the end goal of making people's

[00:03:14] mindset better. Improve mental health and well-being. And well-being. And this sort of reframe is really the fresh approach that I think the industry needs. One of the biggest problems in the industry around mental health is low engagement with the stigma around mental health. Take

[00:03:30] clinicians. You have physicians that have pretty elevated rates of depression. They don't seek care because they feel like not yet recertified in terms of their own licensure. And then imagine someone in a union and it's, well, if you're that guy that needs mental health services, am I picking

[00:03:46] you for this job over here? So there's a whole stigma around mental health that we need to turn around. Part of that is happening, fortunately, and youth are leading the charge with being much

[00:03:57] more open to talk about mental health challenges and issues. But the reframing is critical. We've really got to get people thinking about, I want to be happy in my life. There's a science to this.

[00:04:07] There are five things you can do. It boosts your happiness and it makes you resilient. Wow. That's fantastic to hear. And chatting with your team yesterday, I was shocked to hear that 50% of the people accessing the program are actually youth. Yeah. Yeah. It's, we're getting, we have people

[00:04:26] coming in on their mobile phones a little bit more than half the time. We get a lot of youth accessing our system, but it's really all ranges. One of the fastest growing populations on the internet are seniors. So it's everyone's coming on. We currently have about 20 million people

[00:04:41] with paid access to the platform and that number will double over the next year. We're talking about north of 10% of the population of the United States are going to start having access to

[00:04:51] evidence-based self-care. How do I, I've got anxiety, let's say, and I have a son, I have a family member who's had anxiety, had medication, had therapy for it, didn't work that well, used our system to find evidence-based things that they could do, which turned out to be playing

[00:05:10] music and sleeping better. And with those two changes, no more meds, no more therapy, they are, that's three years ago, and they are now completely self-treating. That's evidence-based self-care at worst. They don't have to hit the healthcare system and they're much happier.

[00:05:27] So who's paying for this? Clients pay us and then they make it available to their constituency. So insurance companies for their members, hospitals for their patients, health departments for geographic regions, right? You can launch for a city or a series of counties, universities for

[00:05:43] their students, any organization that has a population they want to help improve mental health and well-being. And you touched on provider health, right? Are they accessing this? Oh yeah. So, you know, it's a huge need. If you look at around 25% of nurses and physicians are saying

[00:06:06] they're going to leave their profession over the next two years, they are burned out. They're not feeling appreciated. COVID really did them no favors whatsoever and they're overrun. We're 250,000 behavioral health therapists short, and that number is estimated to grow to 400,000.

[00:06:22] You know, the concept of like a food desert, right? You can't find any healthy food in this area. It's just a strip mall, fast food. We have mental health care deserts where there are like no psychiatrists in a five-county region, especially rural areas, but not exclusively rural.

[00:06:38] When you have that much professional shortage, that puts such a burden on primary care physicians that are now catching the ball prescribing medications for people. And it's not that they're not trained in this, but this isn't their specialty. Right. And a lot of people are over

[00:06:51] medicated, under medicated, undiagnosed, over diagnosed. Really what we need is a system that does basically two things. And the term that we're using is population-based mental health. We need to move from a reactive system of care, because this is what we do today. We basically wait and

[00:07:06] tell people have enough pain and suffering that they have the courage to go seek services, whether that's a therapist or medication. That's 90% plus of the services available. And so instead of doing

[00:07:18] that, what we need is early intervention in the area of physical health. We move from a reactive system of care and we now call it population health. And that's for the last 30, 40 years,

[00:07:28] you go get open heart surgery next week. When you leave the hospital, they are talking to you about your diet. They're talking about exercise. They're talking about how much you're drinking, early

[00:07:38] intervention and prevention. One, so you don't have the heart attack and two, as a good way of recovery. In mental health, we don't do that. We just wait and tell people access services,

[00:07:47] get your therapy sessions, go away, good luck. There is a very strong science base that early intervention and prevention for mental health works. It's crystal clear. There was a study done

[00:07:58] just a few months ago on the efficacy of Lexapro as a drug to treat anxiety and self-care, in this case, mindfulness practice, equal outcomes. Which one do you want to do? Do you want to take a drug

[00:08:10] or do you want to learn how to meditate, appreciate mindfulness practice all day long? It helps in other ways too. How about you guys? Mindfulness? I think so. So what we do, and it's not an either or, right? You put it together. You want something made available

[00:08:23] to the whole population that you serve and you want them to have evidence-based self-care and learn about the things that are going to make them happier and more resilient and help them find services where you need them. And that's where this country needs to go.

[00:08:37] I love when simple ideas that are well executed can create a ripple effect of positivity. And this is one of them. I love what you guys are up to and I think the opportunity is huge

[00:08:52] for our country and I think also the world, but let's start with our country. Yeah, that's it. We got problems at Dixie right now. We do. Derek, so there's a lot of people that are watching us and listening to our podcast today

[00:09:04] that didn't have the chance to be at AHIP 2024. What have you seen, heard, been in discussions about here at the conference that has risen to the top as an insight that you want to share with

[00:09:15] everyone? There are a few. This is a great conference and there's a lot going on. I was in, I really liked how succinct one person put this, which is it was a mental health related topic

[00:09:25] because that's a big deal, right? So that's one of the main topics here. And one of the things on this panel discussion that someone said is we cannot clinically treat our way out of this

[00:09:35] national crisis with the shortage of professionals, the size of the problem, the increasing rates, it's bad and getting worse and there aren't enough clinicians. We can't clinically treat

[00:09:45] our way out. So now what? So I think that was just a very succinct boom. I think the other thing is people are talking a lot about access and quality. We've got people that have coverage for insurance,

[00:09:58] right? We have problem with people that don't have coverage too, but we have people of coverage, but they really don't know what's available to them. So this whole idea of on a more granular micro-marketing basis, understanding people's profiles and what their needs are and connecting

[00:10:15] them to services or self-help, not just mental health now, I'm talking about physical health too. I think that whole micro-targeting is a huge thing here. That's fascinating. And is this micro-targeting something that plans should be thinking about and providers should be thinking

[00:10:30] about? A hundred percent. It's the idea of being proactive versus reactive, right? You have claims data. Let's just take an insurance company. You've got claims data. You know a lot about an individual, but you're doing almost nothing proactively based on the data that you have

[00:10:46] to go in there and find out like a simple thing, like a risk assessment. How are you doing? Do you want to find out how your baseline is and things you can do? Because maybe some of the data has

[00:10:57] triggered an idea that we might be able to catch something earlier. And then once you have more data, now you can start helping them sign up for something as simple as a newsletter. It costs

[00:11:06] almost nothing at scale, but how often do you get prompted for something like that in an area that's relevant to you? Not just mass blasts. I think it's a great opportunity that you're calling out. It's layering on a new sophistication and distinctions to the approach. Absolutely. First

[00:11:25] of all, we just have more data. And second of all, the technologies, including AI, where AI has this sort of odd reputation right now because people aren't quite sure how to use it, what's appropriate,

[00:11:35] it makes things up, blah, blah, blah. But AI is fantastic at finding insights and data and being able to help humans or human overseeing technology make more targeted recommendations. That's great. Great opportunities here and really appreciate you sharing them with us, Derek. Yeah. What closing

[00:11:55] thought would you leave everyone with and what's the best place they could get in touch with you and the team to learn more? The phrase is population-based mental health. If you care about a group of people, don't just think reactive. You need a one-stop shop, population-based, all topics,

[00:12:12] all evidence-based approaches, and where to find services, one place. That's what we could help with. CredibleMind.com. Love it. We're here. Love talking. Easy peasy. Derek, thank you so much. It's our pleasure.

[00:12:25] I've seen your podcast. Thanks for the good work. Of course. And by the way, everyone, just a reminder, check out the show notes for just the short notes on this interview as well as links to get in touch

[00:12:35] with Derek and his team. Thank you all for tuning in. And Derek, pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me.