AI was making inroads into behavioral health before COVID struck; the pandemic has seriously sped up that transition.

That’s according to a commentary at MedCityNews by Roy Weisner, Managing Director at aMoon Fund, an Israeli life sciences and health tech VC.

As Weisner sums up the situation, spending on behavioral and mental health has been steadily rising, in recent years, as people have sought to manage illness, unemployment and social isolation, and not surprisingly the pandemic has contributed to a significant spike in all three.

“The Covid-19 crisis will have long-term consequences on mental health, and these need to be prioritized,” he says. “In 2019, about 11% of U.S. adults surveyed by the U.S. Census Bureau reported experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression; that percentage skyrocketed to 42% by December 2020 and is likely to increase.”

In Weisner’s view, one bright spot for both providers and patients regarding the rapidly increasing pressure on the mental health system is that the potential for AI to help ease that pressure is significant.

Weisner points to the rapid rise of virtual therapy sessions, which both redefine the patient experience but “also transforms the clinicians’ practice by making it easier to introduce and incorporate data analytics. These invaluable insights can help practitioners transition into evidence-based care, where data is collected in a similar fashion through electronic medical records (EMR) and used by most physicians.”

In particular, says Weisner, an AI platform can run “seamlessly in the background of therapy sessions, capturing every interaction and generating the baseline for clinical notes. This saves clinicians time — time better spent on patients — and provides data-driven insights about the session, patient progress and guidance for future interactions.”

Moreover, the platform is HIPAA-compliant and the session’s content is anonymized after a few weeks.

Weisner recognizes that mental healthcare that integrates human and AI is still in the early days, and that there’s no shortage of significant challenges to address. Still, he says the potential benefits are enormous for all stakeholders: patients, therapists, providers and payers.

“AI, when employed in a careful, well-though-out manner, has the  potential to help therapists derive useful insights and ultimately provide better care in a timely manner,” Weisner argues. “This could have a positive impact also on the patient’s physical status. There is an increasing prevalence of comorbidity of mental and physical diseases, with increased costs to the patient and the health care system. Ensuring timely and effective mental health treatment is paramount to improving people’s physical well-being.”

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