Researchers at Stanford Psychiatry awarded grant to research the impact of Teleo virtual therapy platform in clinical settings

We are pleased to announce that Stanford Psychiatry’s David Hong, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and Eric Kuhn, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, have received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health titled, “Engagement and clinical impact of the Teleo virtual therapy platform in clinical settings.”

The funding, called a Small Business Technology Transfer grant, supports research and development by small businesses of innovative technologies that have the potential to succeed commercially or provide significant societal benefits — in essence, to help small businesses move their technologies from the lab into the hands of customers. Teleo is developing a HIPAA-compliant virtual therapy room for children with the goal of improving how clinicians deliver remote teletherapy to children.

Remote teletherapy can help reduce barriers to mental health care by enabling more accessible, convenient, and lower-cost care for children. Given these advantages, many mental healthcare providers are offering telehealth options. Unfortunately, clinicians working with children remotely may experience low in-session engagement, which is tied to worse clinical outcomes, treatment drop-out, and provider turnover. In-session engagement — active involvement in an intervention — is associated with improved outcomes for depression, anxiety, and substance disorders.

Dr. Hong and Dr. Kuhn will lead the study team at Stanford, which includes colleagues Dr. Shannon Wiltsey Stirman, Dr. Shea Fedigan, and Dr. Jane Paik Kim. They will conduct user-experience focus groups and interviews to solicit qualitative feedback from both clinicians and patients to iterate the Teleo product. Iterations will be tested in a pilot randomized control trial to evaluate the potential for improved pediatric patient engagement in teletherapy relative to standard video conferencing. In a second phase of the research, the study team will investigate ways to improve clinician acceptability, clinical workflows, and client engagement. Engagement and clinical outcomes, as well as practice performance and value-based outcomes, will be measured and compared to standard-of-care. The resulting data will help demonstrate whether Teleo enhances pediatric behavioral health.

“Engaging children in telehealth is a tremendous challenge on traditional video-teleconferencing platforms. This is a huge problem because distracted, non-engaged children do not fully benefit from psychotherapy delivered over telehealth.” says Dr. Kuhn. “Therefore, it is vital that telehealth platforms, like Teleo, develop and test more engaging, interactive interfaces that can be personalized to capture and sustain the attention of children patients and can enable clinicians to deliver more effective care. So, we’re very excited to work with Teleo to tackle this problem and ultimately help reduce the suffering of children with mental health conditions.”

Dr. Hong and Dr. Kuhn co-lead the Mental Health Technology and Innovation Hub in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, along with Dr. Shannon Wiltsey Stirman. Their work, in part, focuses on teletherapy, mobile health interventions, and measurement-based care technology.

More Information

For more information about this study, please visit NIH’s RePORTER