The coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe has put a huge strain on the U.S. healthcare system and especially the people in the proverbial trenches. First responders and other front-line workers see long hours, dwindling protective equipment supplies and equally beleaguered support.

To respond to that greatly increased stress, Google Cloud and researchers at the University of North Carolina and Harvard created the “Heroes Health Initiative,” which rolled out an app today that will take mental health self-assessments from healthcare workers and help track trends over time.

Even in the best of times, front-line workers have always been vulnerable to stress-related physical and mental health issues such as depression and suicide. Now, with a global pandemic at our doorstep, healthcare workers are under even more stress than before, the industry’s workforce is reporting increasingly alarming rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia and distress.

One study done in China, the first region of the world to get hit hard by COVID-19, showed that healthcare workers engaged in direct diagnosis, treatment and care of patients with the disease had a higher risk of mental health symptoms.

The Heroes Health app will enable healthcare workers to combat these additional stressors by tracking their own mental health using five- to 10-minute weekly mental health self-assessments. The app will also display symptom summary reports and trends over time. Those workers in need of assistance can also immediately access support from mental health resources.

The app will emphasize free or low-cost services for healthcare workers with the objective of delivering ease of access and encouragement to seek care.

Source: UNC Heroes Health Initiative

The vision of the app is to provide an easy way to self-monitor mental health without the stigma of revealing any personal information about themselves to any source other than their own doctors. Other information collected will be anonymized and used to provide data on where more mental health resources may be needed.

For healthcare organizations, the app will act as a data aggregation resource that will assist in identifying if particular units are experiencing outsized stress. Due to the cultural stigma regarding mental health and its extremely personal nature, many workers show very few outward signs of stress. This can lead organizations to underestimate the issues facing workers.

The Heroes Health Initiative is spearheaded by UNC School of Medicine physician Dr. Samuel McLean, the research vice-chair in the Department of Anesthesiology and an attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine.

McLean is a practicing emergency physician who has himself survived a bout with COVID-19. As part of his experience as a frontline worker and his experience with the stress healthcare workers suffer, he sought out technology partners to help bring this initiative and its attendant app to life.

The tool is built on Google Cloud’s implementation of the U.S. Food and Drug Association’s open-source MyStudies platform, which permits an app to scale up based on demand and maintain compliance with privacy regulations regarding individual health information.

Heroes Health is now available to healthcare workers and first responders and is being deployed at UNC Health, with a subsequent roll-out to other organizations around the U.S. Some of the first organizations to get immediate access include University of North Carolina, Rhode Island Hospital, Brown University, Cooper University Hospital, Indiana University Health and Jefferson Health.

Healthcare and front line workers can download the app from Google Play and Apple Inc.’s App Store.

Photo: Pixabay; image: Google