Dartmouth’s Center for Technology and Behavioral Health Launches Collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim to Develop Digital Health Tools to Help Patients and Providers
Lebanon, NH – October 30, 2024 – The Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth has announced an innovative collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim with the goal of advancing prescription digital therapeutics that specifically target serious mental illness. The collaboration will leverage each organization’s respective strengths in academic research and the healthcare industry to develop tools that can address the global mental health crisis.
“This collaboration embodies our commitment to bringing the best science to build the most effective, engaging tools,” said Lisa Marsch, PhD, founding director of CTBH and the Andrew G. Wallace Professor within the Departments of Psychiatry and Biomedical Data Science at Geisel School of Medicine. “We’re also deeply committed to scaling things that work and having an impact on people’s lives in the real world across the globe.”
The one-year collaboration, with the option for renewal, aims to combine CTBH’s pioneering research with Boehringer Ingelheim’s industry expertise. Their focus will be to create, study, and implement digital health solutions that could revolutionize how clinicians prescribe digital health tools to address mental and behavioral health conditions. This initiative, which has been years in the making, is set to officially launch this fall.
“This collaboration aims to elevate the promise of prescription digital therapeutics, which have the potential to positively impact the health and quality of life for people living with serious mental illness, as well as provide easier access to care,” said Michael Jablonski, PhD, vice president of clinical development and medical affairs at Boehringer Ingelheim. “There is a need for new mental health treatments and approaches that can address the unique needs of people living with serious mental illness. CTBH shares with us a belief in creating a deeper understanding of the drivers of serious mental illness, and this collaboration is an important step forward in the long-term journey of delivering more integrated and tailored solutions to enable better outcomes.”
Boehringer Ingelheim is also sponsoring a research project with Dartmouth in which researchers will use ecological momentary assessment and digital sensors on a patient’s mobile phone to monitor both cognitive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. The data collected will be utilized to understand how these symptoms track over time and to build models to forecast future changes in cognitive and negative symptoms.
Looking forward, both CTBH and Boehringer Ingelheim are enthusiastic about what this collaboration can achieve. “We aim to conduct rigorous scientific work to understand what truly works and what doesn’t. Moreover, we want to engage in active dialogues with leaders in the commercial, industry, policy, and regulatory spaces,” Marsch emphasized.
Throughout the collaboration, the two organizations will hold regular in-person meetings together, share quarterly updates, and convene at CTBH’s annual Digital Health Summit in late October. These discussions will focus not only on scientific advancements but also on the practical integration of effective products into real-world clinical practices.
“It’s about understanding how to implement these tools in the real world—how they fit into clinical practice and workflows, who administers them, and how they’re offered to patients,” Marsch added, pointing out the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
Jablonski further highlighted the educational component of the CTBH and Boehringer Ingelheim collaboration, which will be crucial in overcoming barriers to adoption. “We’re working to educate healthcare providers on the potential of prescription digital therapeutics and how they might be used in the future. Right now, this is an emerging treatment modality, so it is difficult for people to envision using a prescription on a smartphone to treat conditions as severe as schizophrenia,” he noted.
By combining CTBH’s research expertise with Boehringer Ingelheim’s industry knowledge, these collaborations have the potential to make a lasting impact on mental health and substance use treatment, offering new hope to millions of patients worldwide.
About the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health
The Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth (CTBH), recognized as a “Center of Excellence” by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is dedicated to developing clinical-grade digital therapeutics that enhance access to and quality of behavioral healthcare. These tools have been shown to improve patient outcomes while reducing costs, making them a vital component of the future of healthcare. To learn more about the CTBH, please visit http://www.c4tbh.org.
About Boehringer Ingelheim Mental Health
At Boehringer Ingelheim, we aspire to transform mental health by placing an individual’s specific needs at the center. Our research approach, known as Precision Psychiatry, uses a deep understanding of the underlying neurobiology to develop treatment approaches that target specific symptoms in people living with mental illness. Our efforts go beyond pharmacologic interventions because we recognize that the needs of people living with mental health conditions are complex and highly individualized. We believe the future of care for people with mental illnesses will often involve a combination of treatment modalities that could include pharmacotherapies, behavioral therapies, psychosocial interventions, community support, and prescription digital therapeutics, to achieve more integrated and tailored solutions that enable better outcomes.
Learn more at Mental Health | Boehringer Ingelheim (boehringer-ingelheim.com).
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