Thriveworks, a hybrid mental health provider, is launching a dashboard that gives referring providers real-time visibility into patient progress.
When a primary care physician or specialist refers a patient to Thriveworks, they can sign in to a dashboard to view important data such as whether the patient was successfully treated, their clinical progress, and the medications prescribed by Thriveworks clinicians.
Although the dashboard itself is not integrated with the electronic health record (EHR), certain data regarding outcomes, medications, and diagnoses is already relayed to the EHR by Thriveworks. Additional functionality will be added to your provider dashboard, including the ability to message your Thriveworks therapist. Practice managers can also access dashboards to gain insight into population health levels.
“I know first-hand how important it is to be able to track what is happening with patients,” Thriveworks CEO Dr. Dan Frogel told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview. “If you’re going to provide services and products that are truly about integrated care,[referring physicians]have to have visibility, communication, and collaboration.”
The company’s goal is to advance mental health towards better integration with the healthcare system, rather than remaining in a silo. Frogel saw this issue up close as an emergency medicine and ER physician, where timely mental health interventions are critical but often lacking. Mental health treatment leads to improved clinical outcomes and reduces the risk of readmissions and emergency department visits. According to Frogel, there is still a way to go to improve integration.
Recognizing that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to mental health, Thriveworks is building specialized care pathways that tailor mental health care to specific medical conditions. In the coming weeks, Thriveworks plans to roll out specialty care pathways in endocrinology and gastroenterology. Thriveworks plans to add five more areas by the end of 2026, including nephrology.
“There’s a lot of specificity in the mental health field to tailor care to patients with these conditions,” Frogel says.
Thriveworks also works with health systems. Previous partners include Adventist Health, Tufts Medicine, MUSC Health, Ardent, and Providence. Frogel said health systems are interested in working with Thriveworks to enhance access to mental health treatment because of the company’s innovations in specialized care pathways. Another big advantage is Thriveworks’ 340 physical locations across the U.S., which are important centers of care for some patients.
Thriveworks’ clinicians are hired under the W2 model, which increases accountability and alignment with the company’s goals, Frogel said. Thriveworks also integrates with the EHRs of our health system partners.
“The real motivation behind it is that the physician’s workflow is sacred,” Frogel said. “The real value of the integration we are doing is that it will allow us to refer patients to mental health in the same way that referring physicians do within the system.”
Thriveworks clinicians typically assess depression and anxiety through patient-reported outcome questionnaires. Assess patients every 2 weeks if they are more severely ill and monthly once their scores stabilize. Some surveys, such as screening for substance use disorders, alcohol use, and smoking, may be administered only once or infrequently.
Last year, Thriveworks launched a booking platform for providers called ThriveConnect. This allows healthcare providers to match and schedule patients with Thriveworks clinicians in real-time. The goal was to streamline schedules, avoid delays in treatment, and grab patients the moment they are ready for referral.
