Heroes Health
About Heroes Health
Even before COVID-19, healthcare workers and first responders were vulnerable to depression and suicide. Since the pandemic, they have faced overwhelming conditions that place an enormous amount of stress on their mental health. We need to protect the health of these healthcare heroes, ensuring that they get the care that they deserve and are in the position to effectively care for the patients that rely on their sound judgment.
One Mind is a proud supporter of Heroes Health, an app-based initiative that offers assessments that help healthcare workers and first responders self-monitor their mental wellbeing in the same way that they might monitor their blood pressure or other vital signs. The app also provides links to access immediate support and mental health resources for issues like sleep and stress, emphasizing services that are free or low-cost. For healthcare organizations who partner with Heroes Health, the app provides a way to identify when and where more support for workers is needed. Communities need this valuable information to effectively care for one another.
Heroes Health was developed in partnership with the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, UNC Health, and X Development, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. The principal investigator of Heroes Health is Dr. Samuel McLean, COVID-19 survivor and Jeffrey Houpt Distinguished Investigator and Director of the Institute for Trauma Recovery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is an attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine. McLean’s Co-Principal Investigator is Ron Kessler, PhD, McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. Dr. McLean and Dr. Kessler are co-principle investigators on the AURORA Study on trauma and post-traumatic stress that One Mind also supports. The Heroes Health team includes healthcare providers, mental health researchers, epidemiologists, product managers, software engineers, data scientists and machine learning researchers/engineers and volunteers across Alphabet.
Goals
Provide aggregate data necessary to identify times or specific units where more worker support is needed
Help hospitals and health systems perform proactive outreach to workers in need
Provide mental health support for frontline healthcare workers and first responders
Heroes Health app available now
The pilot version of the app is available through the App Store and Google Play Store in the U.S. free of charge to any healthcare worker or first responder.
Through Heroes Health, workers are notified each week to take a 5-10 minute mental health assessment. Once the assessment is completed, the app displays a brief summary of the user’s mental well-being along with trends in their reported mental health over time. Workers can also use Heroes Health to give feedback on quality and quantity of PPE, support for workers, and organizational communication.
Some of the first organizations to roll out the Heroes Health pilot were UNC, Rhode Island Hospital/Brown University, Cooper University Hospital in Camden, NJ, Indiana University Health, and Jefferson Health, Philadelphia, PA.
Founding Consortium Partners
It’s important to give first responders and healthcare workers a simple, quick way to regularly check in on their mental health and immediately find resources. It is also important to provide organizations with tools that help empower them to care for each other.
Dr. Sam McLean
