Can Mental Illness be Treated With WebRTC?

WebRTC fits into many verticals. Here’s one I doubt, but apparently makes sense.

I just bumped into a new study around online psychotherapy on Mashable. The gist of it? Online psychotherapy is just as good as being there in person:

Following the therapy treatments, researchers say both groups reported lower levels of depression. The specific results were similar: 53% of patients in the online therapy group were no longer diagnosed as depressed, compared to 50% in the face-to-face group. […]

So… there’s another one of these use cases of one-to-one calling that done online is… even better than the real thing? Maybe not, but just as good is probably correct.

We’ve seen the expert market emerging already with WebRTC. There have been numerous rumors of Google joining in with a service called Helpouts (which I find rather bizzare, but that’s a subject for another post).

The expert market is a perfect fit for WebRTC and for startups. It has all the ingredients required for success:

1. It requires one-to-one video call in most scenarios, making it easy to implement with WebRTC
2. It has a specific business process built into it, where the call itself is a small portion of the whole service, which gives an advantage to a technology that can be meshed up into a public website
3. It relies loose identity and membership – no need for the customers to sign in in any way (besides giving a credit card?)

Psychotherapy isn’t far away in this regard. It might require a bit more in the way of certification processes (HIPPA compliance anyone?), but at the end of the day, there’s a real advantage for WebRTC over other technologies in making this a reality.

I am not sure I’d send a friend with mental illness to talk to his laptop anytime soon (or be doing it myself), but something tells me others will. Oh, and if you plan on getting into the telehealth market and intend on using WebRTC, the low hanging fruit may just as well be this type of an “expert market” use case.