As employers and employees look for solutions to
As of 2024, 93% of employers offered telehealth options, according to data from Kaiser Family Foundation. With advancements in technology, these tools are especially helpful when addressing mental health in the workplace, an area still plagued with accessibility challenges and stigma.
"There's this need to segment how you talk about your benefits and care approaches in a way that speaks to different audiences and what they care about," says Joe Grasso, VP of workforce transformation at mental health and wellness platform Lyra Health. "But employers don't want to manage six to eight vendors [to do this]. There's this demand to have a solution that's really comprehensive, but also holistic for the employee, and easier to manage for the benefits leader."
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At Lyra Health, their virtual care model works in tandem with clinicians and providers, enabling employees to find the right fit for their level of support. Whether that's mental health education, coaching, or weekly therapy sessions, technology supports each employee's individual journey, Grasso says.
Facilitating diverse and personalized care
"Technology allows us to scale care without sacrificing personalization or quality. One of the ways that we do that at Lyra is through guided care pathways. So essentially, the front door to using Lyra is a quick triage process that allows us to understand, what is an individual's clinical need? Is it coaching? Is it therapy? Is it medication? And then, how do we tailor further to make sure that no matter what their need is, they're getting a provider who's then matched to their specific issue. The user can select them based on preferences like location or modality. We can also make it feel hyper-personalized through technology with profiles that allow an employee or a user to see a video description of the provider, where the provider is describing their style or therapeutic approach."
Improving accessibility
"Technology provides us with a way to serve up content that is going to help build some mental health literacy and skills, in order to create that scaffolding that makes them want to get care or provides them with enough support. Technology also facilitates better care through tracking of outcomes and through adapting care based on that real time data. We are constantly collecting data from our clients to tell us, is care working and is it working efficiently? Are people getting better in a timeline that is aligned with their goals? People don't want to stay in care forever, and our therapists and providers are tweaking the treatment plan and also tweaking the content that we deploy in-between sessions to make sure that a member is progressing through their care journey at the rate and to the degree that we would expect."
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Supporting benefit leaders and clinicians
"Therapy is always going to be a human-led process, but AI has a critical role to play in making care more efficient and personalized and scalable. So some of the ways that we want to make sure that it's used responsibly is in the triage process and care matching. Things like machine learning can help ensure that high quality match. AI can also personalize things like digital content delivery, making sure that we're serving up the right in-between session content to help bolster what you learned in your live session, or help bolster your engagement in care through nudges that feel timely and relevant.
Also, AI enhances care quality for providers. So at Lyra, we've been using AI to lighten the administrative load for clinicians. So for example, we use AI to help them generate their session notes. Those notes are always reviewed and approved by the clinician, but it's a great example of how humans are always in the loop. And for employers, I think AI enables better visibility into population level mental health needs. So we're also using AI to help give HR leaders more actionable insight into what we think that you could do within the workplace."
