Dr Isaac Galatzer-Levy Points to Unmet Needs in Trauma Treatment and the Potential Role of Technology

Isaac Galatzer-Levy, PhD, assistant professor in psychiatry and bioinformatics, NYU School of Medicine, and vice president of clinical and computational neuroscience, AiCure, says that the solution to expanding access to mental health assessment and treatment in the aftermath of traumatic events is likely technological.

Transcript

What currently unmet needs in trauma treatment could potentially be filled by remote monitoring through apps?

The major problem in mental health, and really healthcare across the board, is access, so anything that increases access to assessment and quality care can have a huge public health impact. If you think once again about the context of trauma that can affect anyone, regardless of socioeconomic status, regardless of context, it’s very important to increase the access to good methods to evaluate people at risk and good methods to intervene with them.

Technology has the power to have that kind of reach. If we had very, very good clinicians, we could deploy in all of these sorts of settings and we could do a lot of good, but that’s very expensive, it’s very labor intensive, and it’s just not really gonna be a reality. So if we want to help soldiers right after they’ve been injured, if we want to help people exposed to trauma in the context of traumatic events like terrorist attacks or natural disasters, we really need something that’s very deployable on a very wide scale.

The symposium we have this afternoon talks about, is really the outgrowth of some work that we did with NATO around how can we help in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack, which could happen anywhere in the world, in any language, in any type of context. So how can you efficiently deploy the best mental health services you can? There really is gonna ultimately be a technological solution.