Health IT Pittsburgh Partner Progress Blog:
Clinical Platform Provides Mental Health Solutions for Pandemic and Beyond
Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse partner Clinical Platform is launching new initiatives to combat the growing mental health crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even before the pandemic hit, prompting a mental health emergency that is expected to linger long after the virus is under control, Clinical Platform was already hard at work searching for ways to address the growing mental health crisis among children and youth.
The company’s Green Ribbon Library, an online platform that provides short-form videos and other mental health resources, emerged as a life raft as young people struggle to navigate the flood of emotions triggered by the pandemic – feelings of isolation, distancing, disturbances in routine, disappointment, loss, and even anxiety about themselves or loved ones contracting the COVID-19 Virus.
“We realized early on that there was an epidemic of deteriorating mental health for kids and young adults within the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Michael Maxin, CEO. “Clinical Platform was built to handle large-scale awareness problems in healthcare just like this.”
A Pittsburgh-based provider of digital media content and platforms for patient education, Clinical Platform provides short-form videos designed to educate viewers about mental health issues, as well as chronic disease diagnosis, treatments, and strategies for managing their illness.
Green Ribbon Library’s digital video platform utilizes peer-driven, physician-guided strategies that empower users to understand the importance of their mental well-being; understand all available treatment options; understand how to improve their mental health, provide supportive care to others, and improve quality of life; understand and share accurate and appropriate medical information to promote collaborative informed care; and access information on their own, on any device, from any location.
In addition to Green Ribbon Library, the company also offers “Candid About COVID,” a video series featuring teens and young adults who bravely share how the pandemic has affected their mental health, their experiences, and what strategies have been successful in helping them deal with their struggles.
Mr. Maxin, who has extensive experience in patient education and startups, founded Clinical Platform in 2017. The company launched its first platform, Pediatric Cancer Library, in May 2019 as an educational resource for children and parents facing all types of childhood cancer.
Pediatric Cancer Library features 23 videos for children and parents that provide medically and therapeutically accurate information in an easy-to-understand format that can be accessed at the point of need – at home, at school, on campus, even in physician offices. The site also serves as a conduit for enrollment in clinical trials, which areessential to the mission to end pediatric cancer and key to discovering new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer, and facilitates matching patients with appropriate trials.
By August 2020, the company launched Green Ribbon Library in response to escalating mental health concerns triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Clinical Platform is continuing to expand its offerings and has several other online platforms in development to address a variety of mental health issues, as well as chronic disease patient education, acquisition, retention, and recruitment for clinical trials.
So far, the company’s video library has been utilized to successfully educate nearly 6 million patients and caregivers through more than 25 million downloads of its patient education videos about mental health and oncology, as well as cardiology and diabetes.
Hospitals and providers utilize Clinical Platform’s video libraries to educate patients, providing patient support before, during, and after telehealth visits. The white-label videos are available for licensing and syndication, enabling organizations/providers to brand the videos for marketing purposes.
“In addition to expanding our mental health offerings, we also are working on a platform that will focus on rehabilitation, and we have pending platform development in cardiology and women’s health topics,” says Mr. Maxin. “These will be the first of many platforms created by Clinical Platform as we plan to develop dozens of sites to address a variety of chronic diseases and illnesses in the near future.”