← The Digital Executive
The Digital Executive
Jim Szyperski on Transforming Behavioral Health Through Tech Innovation | Ep 1050
00:10:21
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Foreign.
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Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Jim Sapersky. Jim Sapersky is a seasoned Entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience leading technology companies across industries including mental health care, education and energy, financial services and telecommunications. He has a proven track record of driving innovation, building high performing teams and guiding companies from early growth to successful outcomes. As co founder and CEO of Acuity Behavioral Health, Jim is focused on transforming how mental healthcare is delivered and measured. Over the past decade, he has developed technology solutions that improve access, quality and outcomes in behavioral health. Prior to Acuity, Jim held executive roles at PROM Behavioral Health, Power Generation Services and and Web Tone Technologies amongst others. He has also served on the boards and advisory councils of several technology companies and nonprofits offering expertise in strategy, scaling and product development. Well, good afternoon Jim. Welcome to the show.
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Brian. Thank you. Glad to be here.
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Absolutely. I appreciate it. My friend, I know you're hailing out of Atlanta, Georgia. I'm in Kansas City early this morning. So let's just jump into your first question here. I want to talk a little bit about kind of your background and what you're doing at Acuity. So you've led companies across diverse industries. What drew you specifically to focus on mental health care With Acuity Behavioral Health.
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You know, that's interesting. I think like a lot of people, Brian, it became personal probably 15, 10 plus years ago. I had family members who had suffered and some severely from mental illness. And I've been in the tech business all my life. So I had an opportunity to get into mental health technology, speaking to a VC friend at some point and I said, well that sounds interesting and how hard can it be? It's very hard, but so I got into it that way. It's personal reason, like a lot of people do. I think probably the last five years we've seen all kinds of people impacted, but this has been a problem that's been going on for a long time.
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B
Thank you for sharing. And generally when we start the podcast, there's always some sort of story that led you to where you are or a problem someone was trying to solve. And I appreciate that. I think we've all been touched by family members and friends that have been impacted by challenges within the mental health arena. So I appreciate your story, Jim. What are some of the biggest challenges in the current behavioral health system and how is Acuity aiming to solve them with technology?
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That's a great question and kind of, it's kind of a two part one there's kind of the general behavioral health field, and I'll speak to it probably more specifically to the work we do, which is largely in the inpatient psychiatric. At least starting at inpatient psychiatric field. But net there are two. There are more patients showing up than ever. And that's been an escalating trend probably for the last 20 years, but really has spiked since the pandemic and even continues today. So more patients, more people are showing up at emergency rooms, at clinics that are suffering from mental illness. And not only more people showing up, but their symptoms are more severe than they used to be. So if you think of that in context of a hospital, for instance, that requires generally a higher level of care and treatment and probably a longer length of stay. And those things are occurring at the same time. We have kind of well publicized nurse shortages of staffing is a real issue. There's a shortage of beds, inpatient beds across the country. Normally most hospitals are well above capacity on that. So they're trying to find places to put people. So you've got too many people, you're basically oversubscribed, you're understaffed, and probably as importantly, you're underfunded. It's got a horrible reimbursement model currently. So most hospitals maybe recover 65, 70% of their costs. So it's not like there's additional money coming in that can help offset these kind of increases in patient volume. So it's a real problem. And part of what drives that is they're unlike the rest of health care. Mental health care lacks models and kind of standards that everyone adopts and uses. So everyone does it differently. And that makes it very, very difficult to collect data, as you can imagine. Look at that data, analyze that data, come up with best practices, develop best practices, publicize those best practices. So it's kind of all over the place. And that's a real problem because anytime there's that high degree of variation, there's a high degree of cost. I tend to think of it as in kind of a downward spiral. And what we're doing at acuity is we provide clinical operating models for inpatient psychiatry to kind of help nurse staffing, nurse managers, administrators better manage the nurses and staff that they have and the bed utilization and what they have. So essentially, in a nutshell, try to get the right person to the right patient at the right time and make their operations more efficient and provide a model that they can then turn around and talk to payers about.
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Thank you, I appreciate that. And it certainly is challenging all across the health care spectrum. I'm actually a technologist that's been in healthcare 20 plus years, so I get it. But mental health, inpatient behavioral health? Absolutely. Shortage of clinicians, nurses, inpatient beds, we get it. So I appreciate what you're doing, leveraging some technology in there and you know, improving these clinical operating models to make it a better place for our patients and our staff. So Jim, with growing attention on mental health in the workplace, how can employers and digital platforms better collaborate to support employee well being?
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Probably a couple answers to that one. I think the adoption of ACT like the rest of healthcare, where models and standards and data collection and data aggregation and analysis of that has been done for decades. I always use the first open heart surgery, probably had a very, very low survival rate below 10% and now it's 95 plus. And that's because people learn from it. They collected data, they saw what happened, became actionable, best practices, evolved from that. The same things need to happen in behavioral health care. It needs to be far less subjective and qualitative. And although there will always be that component of it and needs to be, it needs to be much more quantitative in terms of people adopting the same standards, adopting models and kind of building on that. And I think until that happens, it's going to be a real problem now for employers. I think everyone just, you know, understand. I think people do more so now than they did five years ago. Mental health care is health care. So when you provide resources to your employees or whether it's hospital staff or whether it's just a general employment environment, provide the resources, provide the support, make sure you're checking on your people. Just like if, you know, someone broke their leg and was gone for a couple of days, you know, people wouldn't think much about that. If someone has a mental health crisis and needs to be gone for a couple of days, you know, people still are less accepting of that and that's just, it's just wrong. So I think it's, you know, kind of a getting standards, getting models in place and supporting that and realizing that, you know, your best employees are the ones that you take the best care of.
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I appreciate that it is so important to implement good standards and models and of course to get there. Sometimes it could be a process improvement process, could be technology, but at the end of the day, collecting and providing actionable data is key to making these data driven decisions for improved care. So I appreciate your insights on that. And Jim, the last question of the day I have for you, what trends are you seeing in digital mental health innovation and where do you think the industry is headed in the next five years?
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You know, I think it is still an area that's ripe for innovation. If you look at mental health, there's a spectrum of low acuity issues, issues, you know, I've got a mild case of depression or anxiety which most of us have had for the last five years, 10 years, and then there's this more severe scale. So I think a great deal has been done to try to come up with ways, whether it's through meditation apps, whether it's through just instructional apps, things you could have on your phone that if I have a mild case of depression or anxiety might be helpful to me if when you get to the larger end of it, I think that's the area in the more severe side of it, that's where it's still very much lacking. So I think where the real opportunities are leveraging data. I mean certainly there's some great things that have been done with generative AI in terms of taking notes and documenting clinicians work and taking the time consuming tasks away from them. I still think there's a great place for doing that. I think the propagation of more screening technologies using AI, you know, so I can find, ferret out or triage better on the front end and I try to identify things early that doesn't necessarily require a human to do at the point of engagement. So can I triage better with that and then get people to the right place based on their diagnosis? So I think technology plays a massive role in that. There's never in my lifetime there won't be enough clinicians, psychiatrists, nurses, staff to deal with this problem. So that's where I think technology can play a good role in supporting that and informing that. I don't think it's a decisioning technology yet in clinical environments. You know, my opinion on that may change over the next five years, but I don't know that it will. I think there, there are a lot of things that technology can do to support the people who are already there and kind of fill in the gaps where they are taking time that maybe could be better done by something that's automated. Does that make sense?
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Absolutely. I love that. You know, just like healthcare, which I was in for many years, mental health is definitely ripe for innovation. Healthcare still lags behind in some areas, but you know, using technology to better triage, like you said, new screening methods, leveraging generative AI technology can certainly help fill the gaps. You know, with hard to keep clinicians you know, maybe improve that timeline from admitting to a bed, that sort of thing. And absolutely, we're going to have to get more creative with our processes, but also the technology that is now here, and it certainly advanced quite quickly in the last couple of years with AI. So thank you, Jim. It was certainly a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
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Brian, I appreciate it. Thank you for having us.
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Bye for now.