Bridging the treatment gap for mild and moderate anxiety and depression across EU

Bridging the treatment gap for mild and moderate anxiety and depression across EU

Each year, 25% of the EU population suffer from depression or anxiety, with higher rates for women than men. The cost of mood disorders and anxiety in the EU is about €170 billion per year. In most of the EU countries, patients with mild and moderate anxiety and depression only get access to specialised treatment from mental health professionals when the illness become severe. In the future, the society will have major problems in providing good healthcare if we are not able prevent more: between 1990-2013 the number of people suffering from depression and/or anxiety increased by nearly 50%. Experts emphasize that Internet-assisted treatments based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (ICBTs) have a great potential to improve care for mental disorders, but current solutions are having a slow adoption by health providers, mental health professionals and patients because they are very generic, do not provide controls to guarantee medical effectiveness and/or have not been designed to be used by health providers. Explorable AS has developed the unique ICBT marketplace specially designed to be directly used by health providers. It includes an authoring tool so that practitioners at these health providers can easily create their owned ICBTs by implementing engaging technologies and gamified concepts. ICBTs will also be available to other practitioners working at other health providers. Patients only get access to ICBTs in our marketplace under the prescription of general or mental health practitioners: in that way we guarantee that patients get ICBTs with proven evidence-based therapies or best-practice methods, and they get access to specialised treatment designed by mental health professionals from the onset of their illness. The overall objective of Mind-Gap Phase 1 is to carry out a feasibility study to verify the technological, practical and economic viability of scaling up our platform to other EU countries (market replication).