Follow our team's recent activities and mentions in the community.
Dr. Torous has been selected as a member of the new World Health Organization's (WHO) Digital Health Technical Advisory Group (DHTAG) and Roster of Experts. The group aims to harness the power of digital health to help achieve WHO’s triple billion goals as set out in its General Programme of Work (GPW13), and its Sustainable Development Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. Read about the World Health Assembly resolution that prompted the launch of DHTAG here.
In collaboration with the American Psychiatric Association (APA), our team has developed a framework to help patients and clinicians evaluate and select mental health apps. The goal of the evaluation model is not to rank or rate apps, but instead equip individuals with a methodological approach to determine an app's efficacy, security, and personal relevance.
Read more about our onoging work on the App Evaluation Model on our website and learn more about where it was recently featured here.
Earlier this month, Dr. CanMişel (Jean-Michel) Kilciksiz joined the Digital Psychiatry Division at BIDMC. Dr. Kilciksiz earned his M.D. at Koç University School of Medicine in Istanbul, Turkey before he began a research fellowship with McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. At McLean, he performed quantitative assessments of mania and psychosis during hospitalization using automated analysis of face, voice, and language. Dr. Kilciksiz also contributed to a meta-analysis on bipolar disorder and a review on novel psychiatric research methodologies. Within our lab, Dr. Kilciksiz is focused on researching cognitive decline in early psychosis using digital technologies.
Learn more about Dr. Kilciksiz’s research and read some of his publications below:
Co-Director of the Division of Digital Psychiatry, Matcheri Keshavan MD, has won the prestigious 2019 NAMI research award. A leader in many areas of psychiatry, Dr. Keshavan is an early pioneer in digital psychiatry for psychosis. Under his leadership, digital psychiatry research has flourished at BIDMC. Read more about the award here.
Liza Hoffman, Clinical Director of the digital psychiatry division, presented at the Harvard Digital Medicine Symposium at Harvard Business School. She described her research on how patients evaluate and choose apps. Read more about the symposium here.
Dr. John Torous, the Director of the digital psychiatry division at BIDMC, weighs in on Facebook's efforts to prevent suicide. “It’s hard to know what Facebook is actually picking up on, what they are actually acting on, and are they giving the appropriate response to the appropriate risk,” he says. Read the full article here.
AI Research Week, hosted by the MIT IBM Watson AI Lab, is a week-long event designed to bring together leaders in emerging technology. Dr. Torous sat on a panel on Wednesday to facilitate conversation around the intersection of mental health and machine learning, and the role ethics play in digital psychiatry and AI. He presented on several projects the Division of Digital Psychiatry is currently working on, many related to how data extracted from smartphones can be captured and analyzed to improve diagnoses and clinical care. Read more about the lab's projects here.
