Cogito Corporation is honored to be chosen as a Best New Product Finalist for the Edison Awards 2012. The Edison Awards are known as America’s innovation awards, recognizing and honoring some of the most innovative products, services and business leaders in the world.
Thank you to our Team, Customers and Partners.
Medicare recently announced that it would cover annual screening for depression.
“The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has determined that the evidence is adequate to conclude that screening for depression in adults, is reasonable and necessary for the prevention or early detection of illness or disability and is appropriate for individuals entitled to benefits under Part A or enrolled under Part B.”
This is further recognition of the scope of the prevalence cost of this disease. If Medicare believes coverage is warranted for their beneficiaries, all health plans should follow.
Cogito provides automatic and contnouos screening and can be deployed via live telephne conversations or through IVR. It is scalable, simple to install and use extremely cost effective
Cogito Health, a Humana innovation partner, presented at the Humana C3 (Connect, Collaborate, Create) 2011 Innovation conference. The conference brings together academics, industry leaders and VCs who are bringing disruptive solutions to unmet needs in the health care industry. Joshua Feast, Cogito’s CEO, presented our Social Signal Processing (SSP) solution for improving depression detection in chronic disease populations and driving double digit growth in member engagement rates. See Humana C3 Results Rollup – External
Joshua Feast Presenting at Humana C3
Simple technologies are available which can dramatically improve the productivity of clinical psychologists while improving customer service. While the supply of clinician in urban areas is sufficient, rural areas in the US often suffer significant shortages in access to all types of clinicians. The result is often that patients go without necessary treatment or, they have to wait inordinate amounts of time or travel great distances to see a clinician. I saw this very often during my days with Excellus health plans where people would travel 3-4 hours from the North Country in upstate New York to see specialists in Syracuse or Albany. I though about this recently when reading a story in Fierce Healthcare
.
In looking for a solution we might look towards another place where scarcity of specialists and urgency of need come together — the battlefield of Iraq.
The US Army uses simple a simple process and set of technologies called “store and forward” to assist with delivering care to soldiers in remote areas. The concept is simple. The data — images, biometrics, or interview data is collected at the front, stored and forwarded to a center staffed by specialists for analysis and triage. Think of the old 60′s sitcom “Emergency”. Those technologies and processes can be made available now to rural areas.
One particular use case is with Clinical Psychologists and Psychiatrists — often is short supply in rural areas. Primary Care physicians can record telephone interviews with clients using the Cogito call bridge. The call bridge analyzes the call for signals, patterns and cues that indicate high probability of psychological distress, and sends a report of the results to the primary care provider. If intervention is needed, the PCP can forward the report and the call recording to the psychologist or psychiatrist who can listen to the interview the form their own opinion and follow-up.
The call bridge is inexpensive and easy to setup and use and could improve the delivery of behavioral health care to rural settings. The result is that more people can be screened without having to travel and specialty behavioral health care providers can complete some level of triage without having to see the patient. Better for all!