A population health approach to workplace mental health: rationale, implementation and engagement.

Objectives: To describe a population health-based program to support employee and dependent mental health and learn from engagement trends. Methods: Retrospective analysis of a program utilizing an assessment of mental health risk. For scoring "at risk," a Care Concierge is offered to connect users with resources. Results: Participation was offered to 56,442 employees and dependents. Eight thousand seven hundred thirty-one completed the assessment (15%). Of those, 4,644 (53%) scored moderate or higher. A total of 418 (9%) engaged the Care Concierge. Factors that negatively influenced the decision to engage care included bodily pain, financial concerns. Positive influences were younger age, high stress, anxiety, PTSD and low social support. Conclusion: Proactive assessment plus access to a Care Concierge facilitates mental healthcare utilization. Several factors influence likelihood to engage in care. A better understanding of these factors may allow for more targeted outreach and improved engagement.

Elucidating the mechanism behind the infrared spectral features and dynamics observed in the carbonyl stretch region of organic carbonates interacting with lithium ions.

Ultrafast infrared spectroscopy has become a very important tool for studying the structure and ultrafast dynamics in solution. In particular, it has been recently applied to investigate the molecular interactions and motions of lithium salts in organic carbonates. However, there has been a discrepancy in the molecular interpretation of the spectral features and dynamics derived from these spectroscopies. Hence, the mechanism behind spectral features appearing in the carbonyl stretching region was further investigated using linear and nonlinear spectroscopic tools and the co-solvent dilution strategy. Lithium perchlorate in a binary mixture of dimethyl carbonate (DMC) and tetrahydrofuran was used as part of the dilution strategy to identify the changes of the spectral features with the number of carbonates in the first solvation shell since both solvents have similar interaction energetics with the lithium ion. Experiments showed that more than one carbonate is always participating in the lithium ion solvation structures, even at the low concentration of DMC. Moreover, temperature-dependent study revealed that the exchange of the solvent molecules coordinating the lithium ion is not thermally accessible at room temperature. Furthermore, time-resolved IR experiments confirmed the presence of vibrationally coupled carbonyl stretches among coordinated DMC molecules and demonstrated that this process is significantly altered by limiting the number of carbonate molecules in the lithium ion solvation shell. Overall, the presented experimental findings strongly support the vibrational energy transfer as the mechanism behind the off-diagonal features appearing on the 2DIR spectra of solutions of lithium salt in organic carbonates.

Structure and Dynamics of the Lithium-Ion Solvation Shell in Ureas.

Lithium-ion batteries have become ubiquitous to modern life because of their use in the energy storage needs of our daily lives. In past several decades, much effort has been put into studying the molecular structure of electrolytes composed of organic carbonates. However, other solvents with similar properties but better thermal stabilities, such as tertiary amides, have not received the same level of scrutiny. In this work, solutions of lithium salts in ureas, tertiary amides with the structure RR'N-CO-NR″R‴, with different sizes and connectivity are studied. Ureas present an interesting case study because unlike organic carbonates, the amide bond is planar and has restricted conformational change. In addition, ureas cannot bind the lithium ion through their nitrogen atoms. By using steady-state and time-resolved infrared spectroscopies and ab-initio computational methods, detailed descriptions of the changes to the lithium-ion solvation structure as a result of the urea structure were derived for three ureas bearing a strong resemblance to commonly used organic carbonates. These results show that the solvation shell of ureas has a tetrahedral structure similar to that of other organic solvents. Although the structure of the amide bonds in these ureas is similar to that of carbonate molecules, the atomic connectivity differs. In addition, the dynamics of the cation solvation shell formed by ureas shows a picosecond motion, which is attributed to deformation of the tetrahedral structure. Our investigations also indicate that the deformation dynamics is controlled directly by the size of the urea because of the rigidity of the amide bond in these molecules. Overall, this work shows that ureas share similarity with their organic carbonate analogues, but the rigid urea structure provides an easier framework for interpreting the vibrational observations in terms of the solvent molecular structure.