These responses are part of a complete interview with health experts from Cerebral, Doctor on Demand and Ginger on mental health. Read the full article and explore the full responses to other important questions.
Hsu Evans: There are three important things that organizations can do to full leverage mental health resources and encourage change throughout their company:
Benders-Hadi: The conversation around employee wellness is not limited to just encouraging them to take sick days or get their flu shot. It’s important for organizations to open a meaningful dialogue around mental wellbeing that is similar to how they talk about physical health.
In partnership with those ongoing conversations, it’s crucial that mental health benefits offered by an employer are as robust as those offered for their physical health. Some steps that organizations can take include:
Robertson: For many reasons, it has always been a challenge to deliver high-quality mental health care benefits to employees. Whether it’s the stigma of receiving care, access or wait-time issues, costs, or other barriers, many employees have been unwilling or unable to receive the care they need for issues like depression, anxiety, insomnia and other conditions.
Today, more than ever, it is essential to provide employees with the services and tools they need to effectively address their mental health, just as employers support employee physical health with healthy lifestyle benefit offerings.
Given the supply constraints and restricted networks of most health insurance plans, virtual care offers a great way to extend the availability of high-quality care in ways that weren’t previously available. Virtual mental health benefits can increase access and reduce wait times, have been shown to deliver equal or better outcomes than traditional mental health delivery models, and can be easily billed through medical and pharmacy claims. The pandemic has catalyzed the adoption of virtual services that many employees were already gravitating toward, and this trend is certainly here to stay.
But it’s not enough to simply offer a virtual mental health service to employees, as these crucial benefits can often get lost in the noise of the overall benefits package and plan design changes. Creating visibility of the benefit is a key component to ensuring that as many as possible know what’s available to them.
A good vendor partner will create and launch a custom communication outreach plan to ensure that members know about the benefit and how to access it. It’s also important that the vendor partner is held accountable for clinical outcomes and member satisfaction in order to ensure that care delivery is meeting your employees’ needs.