While Veterans remain at an elevated risk of suicide, advanced and emerging technologies can play a vital role in enhancing suicide prevention efforts for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
This was the key theme of a recent GovExec guest article by Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, a strategic advisor to DSS. She is also a renowned clinical psychologist and mental health consultant who, as executive director of PREVENTS, built the first all-of-government and whole-of-nation effort focused on suicide prevention for Veterans.
Dr. Van Dahlen’s GovExec article highlights how the VA’s 2023 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Report indicates that our Veterans remain at elevated risk for suicide.
The article goes on to discuss how it is critical to identify those Veterans who might be at high risk and/or have few protective factors. Once identified, we can wrap services and support around them in order to give them the help and hope they need and deserve.
From there, using every tool available to us ensures that every instance of care is effective and delivered with compassion to these Veterans – as well as for helping VA suicide prevention coordinators who often carry heavy caseloads of high-risk patients.
In addition, the article highlights how adopting advanced software solutions, can help the VA to access the right data in real-time so that staff can perform their duties more efficiently and effectively, improving the reliability of the care they provide.
These kinds of software solutions, like Suicide Prevention Manager, can help in:
Presenting data and analytics that reflect overall trends as well as specific information that allows individual patient care to be monitored.
Tracking Veterans who have been identified by the VA as being at high-risk.
Saving VA suicide prevention teams significant time by improving efficiencies in key daily workflows.
In terms of emerging innovations, Dr. Van Dahlen discussed how Traditional AI and Emotion AI can advance suicide prevention efforts at the VA.
Traditional AI focuses on identifying patterns, and analyzing and interpreting numerous large data sets, while Emotion AI can recognize, understand, and respond to human emotions in real-time.
These technologies have the ability to help the VA improve the customer service experience for veterans and their families by providing real-time feedback to customer service representatives about a veteran’s emotional state. They can also quickly identify and address any gaps in service or care.
The article concludes with a discussion around how these tools can alleviate the stress and strain on dedicated VA professionals – increasing the amount of time they can spend on providing direct care to our veterans. Ultimately, advanced and emerging innovation can contribute to VA’s intelligent software capabilities and help save the lives of our Veterans.
Please click here to read the full GovExec article.
To learn more how DSS is committed to helping VA in response to Veterans at risk of suicide, here’s how the DSS Iconic Data Patient Case Manager High Reliability Organization (PCM HRO) solution has helped the VA strengthen its suicide prevention efforts.