Mental Shift: NCHA Summer Conference

This week, Myrtle Beach is not only for the ocean breeze. Two colleagues and I attended the North Carolina Healthcare Association Summer Meeting in Myrtle Beach from July 20–22 to speak from our Mental Shift webinar series.

Our presentation touches on a mental health perspective few of us think about — how employee mental health, or anyone’s mental health, impacts the entire family unit. As such, our presentation was named Mental Shift: Employee Well-being to Family Well-being.

When exploring mental health data in our book of business, I focused not only on the entire membership from our pool of health plans, but also dug deeper into adolescent health. Our population health management consultants are well aware that our clients’ employee population may be struggling with their own mental health and those of their spouses and children. I wanted to explore those trends before, during and post-pandemic world to find out what measures were affected and who they affected the most.

After dividing the population into member relationship, it became quite clear that adolescents appeared the most affected by mental health conditions and diagnoses.

In a pre-pandemic world, ADHD took the cake for most prevalent diagnosis. Post-2020, anxiety and depression took the lead, with anxiety increasing 30% over a three-year period.

One striking trend was telemedicine — as one might expect, telemedicine became an extremely effective tool for providing mental health care, and adolescents were the highest utilizers of telehealth.

As our society eases back into our new way of life, one could expect utilization of mental healthcare to increase. This is not only due to the increased prevalence of mental health issues, in which anxiety and depression are on the rise, but also because we know more people, especially adolescents, are utilizing mental healthcare in a way we’ve never seen before.

It was a wonderful experience for my colleagues and I to share our work to a room full of hospital CEOs and provide the evidence-based support for why we need to pay attention to these trends and that employees in the workplace need all the support we can offer.