Research Article
Real-World Outcomes Associated with a Digital Self-Care Behavioral Health Platform
Krista Schladweiler, Abigail Hirsch, Ed
Jones, Luke B. Snow
Correspondence Address :
Krista Schladweiler
Vice
President
Health Economics and Outcomes Research
USA
Tel: 302-983-2954
Fax: 720-
452-2980
E-mail: kschladweiler@mystrength.com
Received on: September 18, 2017, Accepted on: October 09, 2017, Published on: October 31, 2017
Citation: Krista Schladweiler, Abigail Hirsch, Ed Jones, Luke B. Snow (2017). Real-World Outcomes Associated with a Digital Self-Care Behavioral Health Platform
Copyright: 2017 Krista Schladweiler, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Objective: To evaluate the real-world effectiveness of managing depression on the population-level using myStrength, a digital self-care behavioral health and well-being platform.
Methods: A series of effect size calculations were undertaken to estimate the impact of myStrength on symptom burden reduction among commercially-insured adults showing signs of depression. The depression scale of the DASS was periodically administered to myStrength users to measure self-reported change in depression symptom severity.
Results: A total of 2,138 commercially-insured symptomatic adults were included in the analysis, and 1,142 of them met the criteria for clinical depression at baseline, while the rest were at risk for depression. The myStrength estimated effect size for the at-risk population was 0.66 [95% CI: 0.60, 0.73]. Narrowing the population to focus exclusively on those users meeting the threshold for clinical depression, the myStrength estimated effect size increased to 1.02 [95% CI: 0.95, 1.13]. For both groups, the majority of symptom burden reduction occurred during the first 14 days of myStrength utilization.
Conclusions: Among a real-world, commercially-insured, adult population with some degree of depression, myStrength was shown to have a comparable effect size to that of traditional psychotherapy. Depression management may benefit from expanding treatment offerings to include digital platforms.
KeyWords: Depression, Digital behavioral health, Effect size, Health promotion