Tying Wearable Biomarkers to Value-Based Care in Psychiatry

Scott Fears, MD, the chief medical officer at Amae Health and professor of psychiatry at UCLA, discussed why mental health care has lagged behind primary care in adopting value-based care models, and how wearable-derived biomarkers could eventually close that gap.

Amae Health recently announced they are partnering with Google Health Enterprise to incorporate wearable-derived behavioral data into its precision psychiatry care model.^1,2

Fears said value-based care, in which reimbursement is tied to measured outcomes rather than volume of services, has taken hold in primary care because clinicians there can identify best practices and use consistent measures to drive better outcomes across markets. Mental health, he said, isn't there yet, largely because the field lacks the right measurement tools. Standard instruments such as the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 are useful as screeners and are informative early in treatment, when scores are changing quickly, but Fears said they become less useful as long-term, repeated-measure tracking tools over time.

He also pointed to a gap in what current mental health metrics actually capture. Measures such as whether a patient was screened for substance use are valuable because they increase identification and treatment initiation, Fears said, but they don't answer the more important question of whether the patient's underlying substance use, depression, or anxiety symptoms actually improved.

Fears said wearable devices and the biomarkers they generate could address that gap in several ways: predicting which treatment a given patient is more likely to respond to (for example, medication versus transcranial magnetic stimulation), tracking treatment response in real time so care can be adjusted more quickly, and flagging early signs of clinical decompensation before a full relapse occurs.

"My hope is that translates into value-based care, and it is reimbursed through a value-based care model," Fears said, describing the case he believes wearable data can help make: that more efficient, biomarker-guided care produces better outcomes and therefore merits reimbursement under value-based arrangements.

Fears framed this as a two-part dependency: the clinical case for wearable-guided care needs to be demonstrated through better and faster outcomes, and payers need to be willing to reimburse that efficiency. He said that combination is what would allow mental health to catch up to the outcomes-based measurement culture already established in primary care.

Dr Fears is the chief medical officer at Amae Health and a professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

References

1. Amae Health partners with Google Health Enterprise to bring wearable data integration to the treatment of complex mental health conditions. News release. August 4, 2026. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/08/04/3338378/0/en/amae-health-partners-with-google-health-enterprise-to-bring-wearable-data-integration-to-the-treatment-of-complex-mental-health-conditions.html

2. Kuntz L. Bringing wearable data into psychiatric care: Amae Health partners with Google Health Enterprise to improve outcomes. Psychiatric Times. August 4, 2026. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/bringing-wearable-data-into-psychiatric-care-amae-health-partners-with-google-health-enterprise-to-improve-outcomes