Technology Record - Issue 24: Spring 2022

143 Behind the scenes, Ksana Health has incorporated Microsoft’s Azure healthcare application programming interface for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources into Vira to facilitate the exchange of electronic health records. Ellipsis Health was founded with the belief that our mental health should have the same priority as physical health. Its founders, Mainul Mondal, Michael Aratow and Susan Solinsky, saw an opportunity to connect the dots between the two – establishing a vital sign for mental health. Ellipsis Health uses voice-based technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse speech and monitor the severity of depression and anxiety. The US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that symptoms of these disorders impact one in five Americans, and the associated costs are thought to reach over $1 trillion each year, according to research published in The Lancet Psychiatry. As such, Ellipsis Health’s integrated solution helps healthcare payers, providers and digital industry players to reliably identify and stratify patient populations. The solution uses cloud-based deep learning models to assess patient speech and generate a real-time clinical score for the severity of anxiety and depression. The technology is based on the semantics and acoustics of natural speech, while maintaining compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and General Data Protection regulation. Founded in 2021, Bipolar Buddy was established to help patients with bipolar disorder to achieve and sustain remission. Bipolar disorder affects approximately three per cent of the American population, according to the NIMH. The team at Bipolar Buddy is focused on using AI and machine learning to support mood tracking and pattern recognition, with the ultimate goal of discovering underlying causes of mood changes and providing effective forecasting and predictions based on historical data. Through the Bipolar Buddy app, users can manage their mood symptoms and keep track of their progress. This is a very personal mission for the team at Bipolar Buddy; the organisation was founded by Anish Suri, who was diagnosed with bipolar when he was 19. After numerous visits with psychiatrists, experiencing extreme low points and wanting to remain autonomous and in control of his life, he started developing the technology. Suri is now on a mission to scale the solution and enable others to gain better insight into their cycles and how to manage them. Mental health innovations like these can provide greater continuity of care, improve detection of specific challenges, and deliver more effective and earlier interventions that support patients in non-stigmatising ways. Sally Frank is worldwide lead for health and life sciences at Microsoft for Startups PUB L I C S E C TOR Ksana’s Vira platform collects behavioural data from mobile phones and wearables to derive insights for practitioners and their patients

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=