Dive Brief:

• Mental health workplace issues continue to keep employers awake at night. And one particularly tough challenge is ensuring workers get treatment in a timely manner.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, employers are using smartphones and mobile apps in the difficult mental health balancing act of keeping costs down and receiving the right treatment.
• In some cases, apps monitor employee phone usage, or medical and pharmaceutical claims, to try and determine who needs care. In other cases, employees can text and video chat with therapists, a trend called “telemental” health services.

Dive Insight:

The article explores a Sprint Corp. program that offers 42,000 or employees and dependents a mental-health app from Castlight Health Inc. that uses general personal data to uncover who might be at risk for a mental health condition (and helps them get appropriate care). Nathan Hays, Sprint’s manager of health and productivity analytics, said the company will have an ROI of $2.1 million this year from the app's use.

There is always the risk mental-health treatment done on mobile platforms could lead to privacy loss if phones are hacked, lost or stolen, potentially exposing users’ overall health data. The Journal explained that when they use the apps, employees first give permission to be contacted with care recommendations. And employers never receive data on specific workers - a foundational aspect of any consumer-driven healthcare decision-making technology platform today.

While certainly the jury is out on whether these app-based solutions can have a true positive impact on workplace mental health challenges, they do make sense because people today actively are using app technology for so many other life (and work) management issues.