The Employer Health Innovation Roundtable and Big Health, a digital therapeutics company focused on mental health, recently compiled a Mental Health Maturity Index that looked at the strategies of 35 large employers. The data revealed three key findings:

Companies are implementing mental health programs, but they don't know which ones are working. HIPAA can make it can challenging for companies to confidentially collect health information from employees, which is why the survey sponsors recommend leaning on mental health partners to do so. Once appropriately equipped with that information, partners should provide data on mental health outcomes, such as remission, in addition to engagement.

Within the mental health field, therapists use clinically validated measures to understand the severity of mental health symptoms and conditions. These same measures can be used in various formats to understand changes in symptoms. By relying only on usage data, companies cannot assess which programs actually are improving employee mental health. Given that only a little more than half of companies measure employee stress and mental health, it is not surprising that only 14% assess the ROI of mental health services, making it nearly impossible for HR teams to advocate for additional funding.

Senior leaders are advocates for employee mental health% but initiatives to bridge the gap between saying and doing lag. More than four in five companies said senior leadership visibly advocates for the importance of mental health to the business. Additionally, for 57% of companies, employee mental health is a board-level goal. Despite resounding leadership support, however, many companies are not doing enough to back up their statements with action Lee than half of companies ran an anti-stigma campaign in the last year, and most companies communicate about mental health benefits to their employees only every six to 12 months.

Current mental health care is not reaching all employees in need. Even before the pandemic, traditional face-to-face mental health care was unable to provide support to everyone in need. In fact, half of the counties in the United States don't have a licensed mental health professional. This shortage of providers, coupled with an array of other barriers, means 60% of people who meet diagnostic criteria for a mental health condition don't receive care.

Only 26  of companies said they have a mental health solution focused on reaching these silent sufferers.

"This survey sheds a bright light on the different dimensions in the large disconnect that exists between senior management and workers within organizations when it comes to employee mental health," said Arielle Trzinski, a Forrester principal analyst who wrote the report.

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