APA Debuts Mental Health Innovation Exchange

After a three-year hiatus, APA’s premier showcase of technology and innovation returned this past August as a two-day virtual event. The Mental Health Innovation Exchange included presentations by nearly 40 leaders in digital psychiatry and mental health technology who provided a broad overview of how technology is shaping mental health care.

Following its launch in 2016, APA’s innovation-themed event—then called the Mental Health Innovation Zone—quickly became one of the highlights of the Annual Meeting. The program featured engaging discussions and Q&As, product demonstrations, and a “Shark Tank”–style pitch contest, during which participants presented their creative ventures for improving—or perhaps even redefining—mental health care to a panel of experts.

The cancellation of in-person Annual Meetings in 2020 and 2021 led also to a break in the Mental Health Innovation Zone. Though APA returned to in-person meetings in 2022, APA’s Committee on Innovation (a subset of the Council on Medical Education and Lifelong Learning) decided that the innovation program should be a standalone meeting and free to all APA members to maximize reach.

“COVID forced us to innovate as a profession,” said Manu Sharma, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University and a member of the Committee on Innovation. Over just a few months in early 2020, psychiatric practice converted to virtual-based care, Sharma noted, and based on physician and patient satisfaction, virtual care is here to stay. Sharma noted that the amount of venture capital invested in such mental health tools as digital phenotyping apps and AI-guided chatbots is “mind-boggling.”

The program was rebranded as the Mental Health Innovation Exchange to acknowledge the transition from a physical space to a virtual one, but also to emphasize that innovation spreads through networking and the exchanging of ideas, said Steven Chan, M.D., M.B.A., the chair of the Committee on Innovation.

“Our goal was to make this event as accessible as possible, so each session was designed as a broad introduction into a certain facet of digital mental health,” said Chan, who is also an addiction psychiatrist at VA Palo Alto Healthcare System and a clinical assistant professor (affiliated) at Stanford University. The sessions comprised interviews and conversations so that attendees could watch or listen at their own pace.

In addition to popular clinical topics such as telepsychiatry and mobile health apps, the Mental Health Innovation Exchange included sessions on the following:

• The role of technology in medical education (both teaching it and learning with it)

• Technology-oriented careers, including clinical informatics and medical officers at startups

• Cutting-edge neuroscience tools to identify biomarkers of brain health

• How technology can further diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts

Importantly, most of the speakers were psychiatrists or mental health professionals, Chan said. “This conference was also an opportunity to highlight some of the amazing things APA members and other mental health professionals are doing with technology.”

As several speakers noted during the Innovation Exchange, mental health technology is accelerating with or without psychiatrist input. While it’s commendable that tech entrepreneurs are designing therapeutic apps and social media influencers are raising awareness of mental illness, “psychiatrists need to be more involved in these initiatives to make sure quality of care, privacy, and patient safety are paramount,” Sharma said. The recent problems facing tele-mental health companies for unsafe prescribing practices or selling patient data represent one pitfall of technology gone awry.

“As the flagbearer for our profession, APA needs to educate psychiatrists and raise awareness on what the future will look like,” Sharma said.

The 2022 Mental Health Innovation Exchange, which also featured online product demonstrations, proved a great success, organizers said, with hundreds logging in over the two days and many others catching up later (the discussions were made available on demand for 30 days after the event).

“It was wonderful to see the excitement on display from everyone involved and hear the diversity of ways our field is capturing innovation,” said Luming Li, M.D., another member of the Committee on Innovation. Li serves as the chief medical officer at the Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD in Houston and is an assistant professor at Baylor, Yale, and UTHealth.

Li added that the Innovation Exchange served to support the importance of innovation across health systems and community practices, especially the need for tools and services that promote equitable, high-quality care for individuals in need.

“We need to ensure that innovations in care are safe and available to diverse populations receiving care,” she said.

The committee is already discussing what shape the 2023 event will take. A live event at next year’s Annual Meeting might be fitting, Chan said, given how San Francisco is a hub of technology and innovation and was the site of the last in-person Mental Health Innovation Zone back in 2019. ■