Mainul I Mondal, Founder and CEO of Ellipsis Health
Depression and anxiety symptoms impact one third of Americans, and with the onset of COVID-19, the symptoms have greatly increased highlighting both the immediate value and long-term need for a scalable solution to identify behavioral health symptoms. In fact, representative panel surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess mental health during the pandemic among adults found that 40.9% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition, including symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder (30.9%), a considerable increase compared with the same period in 2019.
Healthcare providers alone do not have the bandwidth to solve the problem at scale which is why Ellipsis Health set out to change that through the power of artificial intelligence and speech-based technology. Our goal is for everyone to have access to mental health professionals and treatment, as we work to eliminate the stigma related to behavioral health issues. We are revolutionizing patient care with groundbreaking development in the quantification of depression and anxiety symptoms – improving quality of life for Americans seeking help for mental illness.
To engage patients outside of the clinical encounter and further aid healthcare providers, the Rising Higher app was recently launched to leverage the ubiquity of smartphones to make behavioral health measurement available anytime, anywhere. This clinical decision support tool enables healthcare providers and payors to remotely monitor symptoms in high-risk patient populations – creating behavioral health vital signs by detecting anxiety or depression symptoms via dual acoustic and semantic-based assessments of patient speech. For example, the Rising Higher app:
· Enables upstream screening: In our current system, too many patients receive treatment for anxiety and depression too late. Rather than relying on self-reporting or recognition by non-behavioral health providers, Rising Higher makes it easy providers and care teams to reach patients on a national scale, as our machine-learning algorithms only require a few minutes of patient speech to generate a science-based assessment of anxiety and depression.
· Delivers visibility into mental health states over time: 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. Our speech-based vital signs enable providers to identify the people that need assistance much sooner in a consistent and scalable manner.
· Predicts behavioral health conditions: 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.
At Ellipsis Health, we are committed to creating technology that is foundational to 21st-century precision medicine for behavioral health. By pioneering consistent, scalable, longitudinal vital signs for depression and anxiety, we are transforming the paradigm on how disease is identified, treated and understood.