Personalized digital care for depression
Thrive is a digital program for depression that distills best practices from cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and teaches them to individuals them through a rich, structured and guided digital curriculum. In both trial and real-world settings, Thrive enrollees have shown high engagement rates and experienced substantial depression symptom improvements.
Fully automated and simple to deploy, Thrive is ideally suited to help healthcare organizations cost-effectively augment existing behavioral health resources to extend care to their high-cost members. And because it’s fully cloud-based, no IT integration is required.
How it works
Thrive uses a combination of symptom assessments, video, interactive tools and branching logic to create a personalized yet structured curriculum for each patient. When patients log in, Thrive remembers what they’ve completed, what they’ve said about how depression is affecting them, and what they’re working on. As Thrive learns more about patients, it offers increasingly specific feedback and recommendations.
Thrive includes three CBT modules based on behavioral activation, cognitive restructuring, and social skills training techniques. Each module is comprised of ten lessons.
Thrive uses the nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) depression assessment to allow users and clinicians to track progress.
By combining the efficacy of CBT, the consistency of software, and the availability of the Internet, Thrive enables care for depression that is effective, standardized, measurable, and scalable.
Outcomes
Thrive’s effectiveness was recently studied in a randomized controlled trial [1]. This registered trial was conducted independently by the Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery at Montana State University with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Read the full article in the Journal of Internet Medicine Research.
When added to usual care, Thrive achieved significant improvements on measures of depression, anxiety, work and social functioning, and resilience compared to usual care alone.
Depression Symptoms
Anxiety Symptoms
Work/Social Dysfunction
Mental Resilience
Chart data above is from Schure 2019 [1]. Baseline scores are unadjusted (see Table 2 in Schure 2019). Week 4 and 8 scores are LSM adjusted (see Table 3 in Schure 2019). Decreasing scores indicate improvement except in resilience domain where increasing values indicate improvement. Between-group p<.001 for each measure.
Thrive has also produced excellent adherence and depression symptom reductions in real world settings among commercially insured individuals, without telephone or face-to-face support:
In real-world deployments, Thrive users:
Depression improvement by baseline severity
Clinicians and Thrive
Thrive is designed to support clinicians and case managers as they care for patients with depression. The Coach’s Portal allows authorized personnel to view patients’ assessments scores and use of Thrive, providing the foundation for progress reviews with patients.
Research and Development Support
Thrive research and development was partially funded by grants from the US Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
[1] Schure MB, Lindow JC, Greist JH, Nakonezny PA, Bailey SJ, Bryan WL, Byerly MJ Use of a Fully Automated Internet-Based Cognitive Behavior Therapy Intervention in a Community Population of Adults With Depression Symptoms: Randomized Controlled Trial J Med Internet Res 2019;21(11):e14754. https://doi.org/10.2196/14754