luciayhuang

We've appointed a Chief Security Officer within our startup that oversees security and HIPAA compliance. We work with Vanta (W18) to ensure compliance (they have automation software and compliance dashboards) and have a third-party auditor as well. I am happy to have our engineering team to tell you more if you wanted to learn! Feel free to message [email protected]

Thank you for your honest feedback :) This wasn’t actually just a school project. Jimmy and I met in the class and stayed in touch. One of the many things we bonded over was our shared mental health journey. From growing up in households where it’s highly stigmatized to dealing with our own struggles during college and beyond, we realized we both had a drive to do something based on our and our loved ones’ patient journeys. We are lucky to work with a number of advisors who are some of the most respected academics and practitioners in psychiatry such as Dr. Charles DeBattista and Dr. Alison McInnes. We know we have a lot to learn and are excited to continue to bring in these perspectives. I am super grateful you’ve pointed out what your perception is! I would be happy to address any additional concerns or take any other feedback :) thank you so much! [email protected]

Thank you! Yes, after rigorous deanonymization we aim to support academic studies that look to research standards of care, efficacies of treatment paradigms, and public health measures. These collaborations can help develop better procedures for treatment resistance

Thank you for the question! We do more than just redact records by erasing names and all demographic information. We actually remove specific pieces of information from all records, such as medications, lab results, diagnoses, etc. and put those into separate files that contain similar information from numerous other records. Thus the only thing researchers see are spreadsheets with a bunch of numbers, medications, and dates that include information from, at minimum, thousands of anonymous contributors around the world who have joined forces to advance science and healing. As a result, the information is totally anonymous. We realize there can be concerns that data in general can never be totally anonymized, but a combination of our rigorous de-identification process, aggregation across (at minimum) thousands of people across the world, and strict laws forbidding any attempt by researchers to re-identify data make it extraordinarily difficult if not virtually impossible to trace data back to any individual or clinic.

Thank you for bringing up this great point - yes, agreed that patient-reported outcomes can be sometimes challenging even though this is the standard of "objective" measurement for mental healthcare! Part of our whole goal is to find additional objective measurements that don't need to rely solely on the patient's reporting. For example, how one uses their phone (have they left the house? are they socializing and in touch with others? etc.) could be telling. By combining different streams of information we can relieve patients, clinicians, researchers of just relying on the types of surveys you talk about to give a more objective view of the patient. We don't know of anyone else taking this comprehensive approach.

Yes please, we would really love that! Can you shoot me a note at [email protected]? Thank you :)

Thank you, we hope so too! Yes, we are planning on using sleep data from wearables or one's phone as well given many of our clinicians have requested it. It would be very interesting to see how that correlates to specific mental health conditions

Thank you for this!! We so appreciate that you are aligned with the approach. We would love to find interesting ways to return the insights back directly to patients. For example, if you're taking XYZ medication, how do your responses compare to the national average? What other interesting correlations can we make to help you better understand your health? It may be a ways off, but definitely something we're thinking about :)

Thank you! Yes, we are planning on using wearables data as well. For example, many of our clinicians want to know how people are sleeping or if they are leaving the house, which both can be highly correlated with mental health conditions.

Thank you for your note - so real! Your work looks really important. Interestingly with self-ensured employers you may want to try their HR/benefits departments rather than anything healthcare related. A lot of bigger companies will also use benefits brokers/consultants like Mercer, Willis Towers Watson, and more. Best of luck and let us know if we can be helpful to you too :)

Really great question! Two things: 1. We have found doctors to actually want to try to do the right thing for patients in this space. Oftentimes they are seeing people who have tried 10+ SSRIs and experienced mental health conditions for decades. These patients are suffering immensely and doctors want to help 2. Our software also helps streamline administrative tasks for doctors, such as scheduling, dealing with insurance, etc. So there is a financial/time-saving benefit for them as well

Yes! While we are focused on treatment-resistant mental health conditions because these patients need the most help, we plan to expand more broadly across mental health. We envision a world where everyone can find the right treatment for them the first time around (rather than having to go through a painful trial and error process) and end all suffering.

Thank you!

Thank you for bringing up the issues around racial biases when it comes to mental health. We hope to address this in multiple ways: 1) trying to incorporate objective forms of information such as digital and biological data that theoretically should be less biased 2) giving back to the community by supporting providers who serve underrepresented communities (we provide our software for free or significantly discounted to these community practices and are working with a number of them already)

And yes, we aim to incorporate various types of demographic information including social determinants of health.