February 2017 – Pacifica

As demand increases for healthcare providers to transition from a fee-for-service to a value-based model, the need to implement measurement-based care is greater than ever. Although measurement-based care practices are commonplace in the medical and surgical fields (testing cholesterol levels or A1C level for diabetes, for example), they tend to be less widespread within the behavioral health community. According to a report published by the Kennedy Forum, only 18% of psychiatrists and 11% of psychologists regularly use measurement methods to monitor their patients’ progress.

What is Measurement-Based Care?

A report in the journal Cognitive Behavior and Practice defines measurement-based care as the practice of basing clinical care on client data collected throughout treatment. Aside from working well with a value-based reimbursement model, measurement-based care can be very beneficial to both clinicians and their patients. Studies have shown that patients receiving measurement-based care are more likely to achieve greater response and remission rates than those receiving standard care. Measurement-based care allows providers to create measurable, data-driven treatment plans that can be amended and reassessed if patients are not responding to a course of treatment. Additionally, when patients are involved in providing ratings of their symptoms, they can feel more actively involved in their treatment and more aware of potential symptomatic patterns.

While it may sound appealing to bring measurement-based care methods to your practice, knowing where to start can be difficult. Creating a symptom rating and tracking system on your own can be cumbersome, and potentially become a roadblock to offering more effective care. Though prebuilt solutions exist, many products on the market often don’t equally address the needs of the clinician as well as the needs of the patient.

Introducing Pacifica for Clinicians

Screenshot of Pacifica's Clinician Dashboard, bringing measurement-based care to your practice — A preview of Pacifica’s Clinician Dashboard.

Pacifica for Clinicians is a first-of-its-kind, web-based dashboard tool that mental health care providers can use to easily bring measurement-based care to their own practice. Using Pacifica’s popular consumer-facing mobile app, which has over 1.25 million registered users and counting, Pacifica for Clinicians makes it easy for you to track your patients’ progress, and use data to inform treatment decisions.

How Does It Work?

The goal of Pacifica for Clinicians is to help facilitate measurement-based care without disrupting your existing practice.

With a subscription to Pacifica for Clinicians, all of your patients will receive a Premium subscription to Pacifica’s mobile application. The app includes a variety of tools based on cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness:

Mood and Health Tracking: Users can enter mood ratings and attach feelings or include notes on each rating. The Health tool allows users to select specific habits (such as sleep, exercise, alcohol, caffeine, etc.) and track them each day. Together, these tools can help users identify patterns in their mood based on different health activities.
Thoughts and Goals: Using one of Pacifica’s nine psychologist-designed thought recording tools, users can keep track of their thoughts and learn to challenge negative thinking patterns. By setting daily challenges, users can reach their long-term goals one step at a time.
Relaxation Techniques: Pacifica offers over 25 audio activities including deep breathing, muscle relaxation, and a variety of mindfulness exercises.
Community and Hope Board: The peer-support community in Pacifica allows users to connect with others for encouragement. Based on the dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) concept of a “Distress Tolerance Box”, the Hope Board is a place for users to save and review inspiring content, including photos, quotes, completed Pacifica activities and community content.
Guided Self-Help Paths: Designed by psychologists, Paths include an audio lesson and accompanying activity. Topics include CBT and mindfulness, with more to be added in the future.
Progress Data: View daily, weekly and monthly progress reports so users can see improvement over time and notice patterns in their moods.

Using Pacifica for Clinicians, you will get full access to the Clinician Dashboard, which offers you oversight of your patients’ progress all in one place.

Review Client Data: Using the Clinician Dashboard, you can see your clients’ mood and health history, goal tracking information, completed thought records and relaxation activities. This can both help your patient feel more involved in treatment decisions and give you more insight between sessions.
Assign Assessments: Beyond gathering data from app usage, Pacifica for Clinicians allows you to assign recurring assessments (e.g. GAD-7, PHQ-9) to your clients and review and export their response data from the Clinician Dashboard.
Assign assessments to your clients and view their responses through the dashboard.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Put measurement-based care in action by using insights from the Clinician Dashboard to assess treatment effectiveness and inform clinical decisions
Coming Soon – We’re expanding the features of the Clinician Dashboard rapidly. Some upcoming features include:
- Teletherapy: Projected for release in April 2017, the Clinician Dashboard will soon include a teletherapy feature that will allow you to perform virtual text or video sessions with your clients.
  Coming Soon: Text and video teletherapy options to conduct virtual sessions with your clients.
- Client Assignments and Reminders: Give your clients assignments to complete activities within Pacifica and send push notification reminders to their phones.
- EHR Integration: Integrate patient data from Pacifica into your electronic health record system.

Security: HIPAA Compliance

Pacifica for Clinicians is fully HIPAA compliant, with all necessary physical, technical and administrative safeguards in place to maintain data security.

The Science Behind Pacifica

All of the tools and activities in the Pacifica app are designed by psychologists based on the scientifically-backed principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness.

Additionally, Pacifica has partnered with the University of Minnesota on an ongoing Randomized Control Trial. The results have yet to be published, but the initial pilot has shown impressive effect sizes across multiple measures, including the NIH PROMIS scale for global mental health, and the DASS-21.

Try Pacifica for Clinicians Free for 30 Days

Ready to put measurement-based care to work for your clients? With your 30 day free trial of Pacifica for Clinicians, you’ll get Premium subscriptions to the Pacifica mobile app for you and your clients and full access to the Clinician Dashboard. You can request a one on one demonstration, or get started right away by clicking the button below.

New Features in Pacifica 5.0!

We are delighted to announce the newest release of the Pacifica mental health app for iOS, Android and web. This release includes a number of new features that we want to talk about here.

Guided Paths

This version of the app includes the debut of “Paths” which are psychologist-designed self-help programs comprised of audio lessons and accompanying activities. Guided Paths have been requested by our users and we are very excited to have them ready. These first four Paths include “The First Week”, an introductory Path, “A New Approach” and “Digging Deeper”, two Paths which focus on Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and “Mindfulness”, which teaches a variety of mindfulness practices and meditations.

The two Paths on cognitive-behavioral therapy, “A New Approach” and “Digging Deeper”, include in-depth psychoeducation to explain how CBT works and how to use the different tools within Pacifica. The activities in these Paths include a number of tools, many of which are new, like thought records or behavioral challenges. The activities build on each other and teach users how to look closely at their thoughts and behaviors to start seeing things in a new, more adaptive way. Changing one’s perspective on their thoughts can help them to feel differently and reduce anxiety and depression. Users might realize that their interpretations contribute to how they feel, and that changing how they think about things can make them feel better. Building a list of small challenges to conquer every day can help people break out of their negative patterns of avoidance and feel more accomplished and capable.

The “Mindfulness” Path activities include three new meditations to help users be more mindfully aware of their thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness has been shown to be effective for a variety of conditions including stress, anxiety, and depression.

In the future we will continue to build our paths library with more specialized tools including insomnia, interpersonal skills, and tools to pursue one’s goals and values.

Hope Board

The Hope Board is a place for users to put inspirational and uplifting content to help celebrate wins and work through challenging moments. In addition to photos and quotes, users can also add links to completed Pacifica activities to remind themselves of what they’ve done well. Additionally, users can save inspiring content found in Pacifica’s peer-support community.

Link to In-Person Clinicians

In addition to the biggest update to the app in Pacifica’s history, we are also announcing the release of Pacifica for Clinicians. Pacifica for Clinicians is a dashboard tool designed to bring measurement based care techniques to any clinician’s practice. The dashboard provides a HIPAA-compliant platform for in-person providers to view their patients’ activities in Pacifica, assign assessments (e.g. PHQ-9, GAD-7), and monitor progress. This connection can help make therapy more efficient and effective and increase engagement and between-session carryover.

“As Pacifica continues to resonate with consumers, the missing piece has been the ability for clinicians to leverage data to provide better informed treatment,” said Dale Beermann, CEO and co-founder of Pacifica Labs. “These releases advance the state of measurement-based care in the industry, while continuing to innovate on self-care with our biggest app update yet.”

Future releases will include teletherapy and electronic medical record integration. Are you a mental health care provider and want to learn more about Pacifica for Clinicians? You can read more here, or request a demonstration here.

Month: February 2017

Pacifica for Clinicians: Bring Measurement-Based Care to Your Practice