AI, VR and CBT: How this national composition panel aims to immerse audiences in the healing experience

Conventions hold a special place for workers’ compensation professionals. Days of networking, sharing ideas and diving into innovations designed to protect workers and get them back to work after injury – what’s not to love?

National Comp 2022 promises to have its fair share of all of these opportunities for attendees…and more.

More, you ask? Well, the panelists for the Wednesday, Oct. 19 session “Breakthrough Solutions for the Mental Health Epidemic” are definitely focusing on After — and with an ambitious goal.

As an immersive experience, this session will explore and illustrate techniques used to address mental health in workers’ compensation claims, coaching, AI applications, VR technology, and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Don’t expect this to be a typical round table. The panelists intend to take a step back, as narrators of the presentation.

“Think Wizard of Oz,” said speaker Gerry Stanley, MD, senior vice president and chief medical officer, Harvard MedTech. “We’re going to be behind the curtain.”

With lights, sounds, visuals and maybe even a (sure) fireworks display or two, “Revolutionary Solutions for the Mental Health Epidemic” promises to be a presentation like you’ve never seen before. at National Comp.

Spectacular, Spectacular

Stanley explained that the genesis for the session came from a desire to see the industry truly innovate.

“[At conferences] we always say we’re going to do innovative things,” he said. But, for him, talking about VR technology – an immersive experience in itself – didn’t seem innovative enough.

In fact, the use of virtual reality in worker composition sparked his imagination and that of his fellow panelists.

“Using virtual reality guided by behavioral health clinicians, it provides the ability to immerse and engage a person’s brain, which promotes healing,” he said.

So why couldn’t a conference session do that too?

“If we can expand that idea into a room full of 120 people and we can immerse them and engage them in an experience for 50 minutes and captivate them in something that’s completely unlike anything they’ve seen in a conference before – it’s dipping their foot in the water of virtual reality,” Stanley said.

Why make a show of it? It’s about healing the workers

At its core, this session aims to provide attendees with information about the mental health epidemic spreading across the United States and how workers’ compensation professionals can deal with its impact on complaints.

“As an industry, we need to start treating people, not diseases,” Stanley said. “We need to understand that mental illness is endemic to the human condition.”

The idea of ​​“buying the mental health claim” seems almost antiquated these days; Nationally, nearly one in five people live with a mental health condition in the United States, or about 4.7 million people.

Regardless of the employment injury, workers will bring with them a certain psychosocial element to their claim. Workers compensation, as an industry, would be remiss to ignore it.

“Mental illness drives a huge percentage of our volatile claims. It costs money and can create bad results,” Stanley said. “We have, for the first time, the ability to harness the power of each person’s brain to tap into, to heal people inherently without drugs or surgery.”

The framework designed for the session will lead participants to discover how this type of therapy helps patients struggling with mental health problems. The aim is to inspire viewers, to show in an immersive way how these technologies can combine to provide psychosocial support.

Virtual reality, Stanley said, taps into brain power.

Gerry Stanley, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Harvard MedTech

“It can promote healing; decrease and alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and pain; and make people sleep better,” he said. “It’s the newest tool where people can be treated completely non-surgically and non-pharmacologically.”

The added benefit of virtual reality: “Injured workers think it’s cool. They think it’s fun.

To be clear, the spectacle of lights, sounds and visuals these presenters have up their sleeves isn’t going to distract from the message; the show, repeated Stanley, is the message.

Join us at the national competition

Stanley, along with panelists Pearl Monroe, VP of Operations, MC Innovations, and Karen Thomas, VP, Clinical Solutions, CorVel Corporation, will present their session — or show, if you will — on October 19 at 3:30 p.m. in session room 2.

National Comp attendees, Stanley says, will come away inspired by the experience.

“People will come away with a bit of admiration in the sense that we have the ability to treat people without drugs or surgery,” he said.

“We have this aptitude at start working on the patients in a biopsychosocial way. We have the aptitude at see at psychosocial determinants of health. We have the aptitude at Support people in novel ways,” added Stanley. “I want to people at walking a way and feel inspired this they or they have tools at their tip of the fingers at change people Lives.” &