Mainul I Mondal, Founder and CEO of Ellipsis Health
According to Mental Health America, the number of people screening with moderate to severe symptoms of depression and anxiety has continued to increase throughout 2020 and remains higher than rates before COVID-19. Over eight in 10 people who took a depression screen have scored with symptoms of moderate to severe depression consistently since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.
Healthcare providers alone do not have the bandwidth to solve the problem at scale, and the pandemic highlights the immediate value and long-term need for a scalable solution to identify and manage behavioral health symptoms. At Ellipsis Health, our mission is to democratize emotional wellbeing by increasing access, improving care and reducing stigma. We have pioneered the first commercial-grade voice-based vital signs to quantify and manage depression and anxiety symptoms at scale.
Through voice, we help people understand their emotional health. From just two-three minutes of a patients’ natural speech, our HIPAA-compliant platform uses machine learning algorithms to generate a science-based assessment of anxiety and depression symptoms. Our models analyze both what is said (using natural language processing) and how it is said (acoustics like tone and timing) to better understand a person’s emotional state. Our clinical decision support tool is re-designing behavioral health – helping payers and providers reliably identify and evaluate high-risk patient populations.
Ellipsis Health is revolutionizing mental health by:
Seamlessly Integrating with Virtual Care Offerings
Our modular technology can plug into mobile apps, patient portals and telehealth visits to provide unparalleled insights for care. This is particularly important in light of a new study from the Journal of General Internal Medicine, which found patients were more likely to use telehealth services for behavioral health treatment than for physical conditions from mid-March to early May of 2020. The results show that 53.6% of patients with a behavioral health condition sought treatment via telehealth whereas 43.2% of patients with a chronic physical condition used telehealth to receive care during the same period.
Closing the Screening Gap and Identifying People Who Need Help Sooner
Our current healthcare system relies too heavily on self-reporting or recognition by non-behavioral health providers. As a result, far too many patients receive treatment for anxiety and depression too late. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), in the U.S., the average delay between symptom onset and treatment is 11 years. By leveraging the ubiquity of smartphones, our technology democratizes behavioral health measurement by making it available anytime, anywhere. Our technology makes it possible for providers and care teams to reach patients on a national scale.
Bridging the Monitoring Gap and Recognizing Deterioration or Relapse
Clinicians often have little insight into a patient’s life outside of a clinical encounter with few early warning signs of relapse. While paper or digital assessments have made headway, they are too time-intensive, too administratively burdensome, lack personalization and are not designed for longitudinal monitoring. The result is poor outcomes, long waits and expensive, reactive care. Ellipsis Health’s speech-based vital signs enable providers to identify people that need assistance much sooner and gain visibility into their mental states over time in a consistent and scalable manner.
Delivering Real-Time Analytics to Providers
By harnessing tone of voice, speech acoustics and natural language, our deep learning models can generate predictions of depression, anxiety or other behavioral health conditions. Rich analytics output is produced based on only a short sample of speech from the patient, and those analytics are made available in real-time to patients’ care teams. Utilizing our solution creates data-driven care, workflow efficiency and positive economics for providers and insurers.
The behavioral health epidemic has become even direr amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now more than ever, providers and patients need access to innovative digital health technologies like Ellipsis to identify and treat depression and anxiety symptoms. Our goal is to improve behavioral health for our stakeholders (patients, providers and payers) and make screening, monitoring and alerting for depression and anxiety symptoms much easier.
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