Early Alert

Early Alert is delivering preventative support for populations at high risk for mental health issues and suicide. The platform uses both automated, confidential text messaging and human clinical care to conduct weekly individual check-ins with all subscribed Veterans, including Veterans who are not connected to VA. As the majority of Veterans who died by suicide in 2021 were not recently engaged in VHA services or VBA benefits, expanding upstream interventions is a VA priority—and scaling supportive check-in services will help reach Veterans before they are in crisis.

Creating proactive, individual wellness checks

Through weekly individual check-ins, Early Alert can connect Veterans to the right local and national support resources—up to and including 24/7 live counseling—at the right time. Early Alert’s approach bypasses many of the roadblocks that keep Veterans from accessing resources at earlier stages of distress; those roadblocks often include lack of familiarity with available resources or low confidence in the relevance of available resources. 

The team’s goal is to proactively connect Veterans in early stages of distress with real people and tailored resources while leveraging automation to increase impact at scale. De-identified aggregate data provides VA staff with a population-level wellness dashboard to support VA monitoring, evaluation, and research regarding wellness policies and programming.

What comes next: Partnering to pilot with Veterans

Early Alert has earned the trust of more than 40 academic programs, who use Early Alert to protect and support the wellness of their students, including Veterans. Early Alert is now identifying VA sites to test their solution locally and nationally, with the goal of evaluating the customizations needed to best meet Veteran and VA needs. 

To learn more about VA benefits, services, and other resources, visit va.gov/contact-us/.