By Scott Dahl

Most people today consult online platforms providing ratings to make decisions on hotels, restaurants, cars, movies, and doctors. Ratings have a major persuasive impact on attitude formation, choice behavior, and purchasing decisions by increasing overall perceived levels of trust and expertise. ‘Expert power’ is a major change in how we make comparisons, gain insight, and choose between similar solutions, especially when faced with difficult alternatives. According to BrightLocal’s annual Local Consumer Review Survey, 88% of consumers turn to ratings and reviews to determine the quality of a local business, and just as many trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. With the psychological effect of crowd-sourced rating forums such as Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, FourSquare, and TripAdvisor, we continue to see the correlation between purchase and usage with scores and stars.

One place where ratings aggregation has fallen short is in mental health self-care. It is generally recognized that people can benefit from being actively engaged in their own care. Effective self-care can help people prevent and intervene early to manage symptoms. Especially for mental health, self-care is a day-to-day process as many mental health conditions are progressive disorders that worsen as time goes on. A shortage of professional behavioral health providers forces us to often look beyond the health care system. As a result, 75 percent of people who attempt to work on mental health issues do so on their own. A vast majority of those self-care resources and interventions, however, have no scientific validity or ratings. Because of the inextricable link between risks and negative health behaviors, understanding the mind and body interventions that can improve function and modulate or reduce symptoms is critical.

A new tool is closing that gap. CredibleMind PRO deliver an expert- and user-rating system like Yelp for the wide range of mental health and emotional wellbeing resources and interventions available. The CredibleMind content engine gives users the ability to post a rating for an intervention and then presents average ratings giving a ‘wisdom of the crowd’ perspective. The expert ranking system, conducted by clinical expert review and artificial intelligence, takes into consideration over 200 different criteria to grade a resource, ranking each on the evidence behind it. The star and numeric value are related to the degree of positive ratings of that work, resource or intervention. Higher ratings presume that the intervention includes techniques or science that encourages change in behavior, reduces barriers, or generally works in the real world. Users can vet interventions most amenable to positive behavior change. Together, the expert and user ratings provide collective wisdom of what is more likely to work. Should ratings between the two conflict, other studies have shown that consumers generally favored peer over expert advice, but this was only true in large numbers of consumer reviews. As volume grows, user ratings will be able to assess differential effectiveness of interventions across different subgroups, such as a cognitive behavior therapy intervention that is much more effective for seniors than for teenagers, for example.

More than 10,000 interventions are now rated covering the risks, vulnerabilities, stressors, and protective factors, all curated within CredibleMind PRO. The portfolio is especially focused on early opportunities — preventing or delaying the onset of mental health issues, helping people change an existing negative behavior, risk or vulnerability, building resilience, and being equipped to cope with major life-events. Interventions cover more than 100 topics having significant effects on wellbeing or mental ill-health, including work-life balance, sleep disorders, childhood trauma, depression, stigma, anxiety, and cognitive behavior therapy. Topics are also targeted to at-risk populations such as LGBTQ, menopausal women, people living with cancer, addicts, and people in chronic pain. The curated health promotion and prevention interventions, along with the ratings, seek to change health behavior by changing health-related knowledge, self-efficacy, and the barriers and facilitators to adherence.

The interventions and ratings are delivered locally through a co-branded, configurable mobile and web system sponsored by employers, schools, health departments, hospitals, health plans, and communities to their respective constituencies or populations. CredibleMind PRO are highly configurable and topics can be customized to targeted audiences such as seniors or youth, and local activities, events, resources. Plus providers can be integrated within an CredibleMind PRO for collaborative change. The sites include evidence-based approaches, self-assessments, current news related to mental health and well-being, and analytics. The online resource expands reach to rural and mental health provider shortage areas, to people without timely access to care, and to individuals hiding their risks or ill-health due to stigma and discrimination.

Scott Dahl is a vice president at CredibleMind. scott@crediblemind.com