Mainul I Mondal, Founder and CEO of Ellipsis Health
Tomorrow, October 10, is World Mental Health Day. The observance is an international day for mental health education, awareness and advocacy against social stigma. Organizations on a global scale will join forces and provide an opportunity for all stakeholders, including patients, working on mental health issues to talk about their efforts to bring behavioral health conditions to light, and what needs to be done now to make symptom identification and access to care a reality for people worldwide.
With the onset of COVID-19, day-to-day life has seen significant changes. Families and friends must socially distance, which can often lead to social isolation, children are now being educated remotely, adults are working from home, economic shutdowns continue, and, sadly, closures of local and national businesses have taken place. As a result, individuals around the world are seeking help for new, chronic or increased feelings of stress, anxiety or depression. This has placed a spotlight on the immediate value and long-term need for a scalable solution to identify behavioral health symptoms. Yet, healthcare providers alone do not have the bandwidth to solve the problem at scale.
The impact of mental health can be measured in various ways. For example, depression and anxiety symptoms cost the global society over $1 trillion dollars each year. In America, $193 billion equals the approximate total amount that serious mental illnesses cost in lost earnings per year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that more than 50% of adults will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in their lifetime, and one in five Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year.
This global need planted the seed for my company, Ellipsis Health, which set out to help healthcare providers address mental health symptoms in a scalable way. To do so, we have pioneered a breakthrough AI-powered technology solution, which enables speech-based symptom identification that is deployable for clinical decision support. By leveraging the ubiquity of smartphones, Ellipsis Health’s cloud-based machine learning algorithms democratizes behavioral health measurement by making it available to patients anytime, anywhere. Beyond enabling screening to be simplified, for the first time the technology app, Rising Higher, gives behavioral health providers longitudinal visibility into depression and anxiety symptoms between office visits to help inform clinical decisions.
For Ellipsis Health, our goal is to do our part to reduce the stigma for patients around the world to access mental health care and resources. In addition, we put trust and security at the forefront of our operations, with special dedication to safeguarding sensitive patient information that is exclusively meant for healthcare providers. That way, we can protect their trusted relationship but also allow for care to be extended beyond the four walls of a clinical office and further address the need for scalable behavioral healthcare.
We are proud to support World Mental Health Day.