The pandemic-driven boom in mental health and wellness apps that helped ease two years of COVID-driven discontents is now raising alarms over privacy, efficacy and a blurring of the line between formal medical treatment and general self-care.
The same pandemic-driven boom in mental health and wellness apps that helped ease two years of COVID-driven discontents is now raising alarms over privacy, efficacy and a blurring of the line between formal medical treatment and general self-care.
"We need to become more sophisticated and differentiate between the apps and what they're trying to do," René Quashie, vice president of policy and regulatory affairs for digital health at the Consumer Technology Association, told Axios. "There's a difference between somebody who's got serious depressive symptoms, and somebody who is going through a stressful period in their life," and apps should be clear about their aims and abilities, Quashie said.Experts who spoke to Axios said mental health apps fall into two camps: those that connect patients to clinicians and those that don't, instead offering chatbots, mood trackers and guided breathing exercises.
"I think we all want for there to be great ways to see our doctors remotely... but when you move to online, you have to think about the modality of treatment, and whether it's going to be effective," Christina Farr, a health-tech investor at Omers Ventures, told Axios. For example, Farr said, cognitive behavior therapy is especially popular for online health services, but it isn't going to work for every patient.Problems are more common with apps that don't include clinical intervention, and thus aren't subject to health privacy rules, and the lack of a comprehensive federal privacy law makes that worse, Quashie said.
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