Ellen Frank, CEO, HealthRhythms

In contrast to all other areas of medicine, mental health care is still reliant on highly subjective, episodic, memory-biased patient reports to make diagnostic determinations and treatment decisions. This leads to poor treatment outcomes, high dropout rates, and unnecessary ER visits and hospitalizations that make mental disorders a $1.7 trillion burden on the US economy and the source of untold suffering experienced by patients and their families. It is essential for care providers today to have a continuous, 24/7 objective, view of patients’ behavior in their natural environment to better identify, manage, and measure mental health. With access to real-time objective data, care providers will be able to detect which patients are at risk of mental health problems, how their patients are doing outside of the clinic, and whether the care plan is effective. This will enable them to provide more efficient and personalized treatments that are tailored to each patient’s needs.

One prominent company that is rigorously working towards this goal of improving mental health outcomes by measuring behavioral patterns is HealthRhythms. The pioneering digital health company offers innovative solutions that leverage deep machine learning and predictive analytics to capture critical behavioral information from physical activity, sleep/wake regulation, social engagement, technology use patterns, , and more to provide a complete picture of individuals’ mental health, with clinically actionable insight.

The Pioneers behind HealthRhythms

The ideation of HealthRhythms took shape when a group of mental health care pioneers, Ellen Frank and David Kupfer, and internationally-recognized technology experts, Tanzeem Choudhury and Mark Matthews collaborated to achieve a common goal of bringing a transformational change in mental health measurement and mental healthcare. The collaboration began when Dr. Matthews was granted a three-year Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Community to come to Cornell University to develop technology for individuals with bipolar disorder. Dr. Matthews quickly identified Dr. Frank as a potential clinical collaborator in the development of such technology and Dr. Choudhury as the ideal technical collaborator. Within a matter of months, they developed a mobile app called MoodRhythm for individuals with bipolar disorder that won the 2013 Heritage mHealth Challenge. They used the $100,000 Heritage prize money to bootstrap the founding of HealthRhythms.

Delivering Unique Mental Healthcare Solutions

Since its inception in 2014, HealthRhythms has developed several best-in-class solutions to improve mental healthcare. One of its offerings is Cue, a highly personalized digital intervention platform that harnesses continuous awareness of a patient’s state, current context, and behavioral trends to provide timely, continuous, and person-specific treatment. HealthRhythms has created and validated the smartphone-based system for fully passive real-world measurement of behaviors and combined the technology with digital therapeutics based on its sensing technology.

“What sets this therapeutic apart is that each micro-intervention a user receives is based on that individual’s own behavioral data, providing a uniquely personalized and, thus, uniquely engaging experience. Current applications of this technology are focused on depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and insomnia,” says Tanzeem Choudhury, the Chief Scientific Officer of HealthRhythms.

It has also developed a premium precision platform for behavioral research to empower pharmaceutical companies and research organizations to run more efficient data-driven clinical trials.

Attributes that Differentiate

According to Paul Gilbert, HealthRhythms’ new CEO, there are two key differentiators that set HealthRhythms apart from its competitors. First, all of its technology is based on a conceptual model that emphasizes the critical role of circadian system dysfunction in the precipitation and maintenance of psychiatric symptoms. It also underscores the role of regular sleep/wake, rest/activity, and other daily routines in maintaining circadian health. This model is based on decades of research conducted by Drs. Frank and Kupfer and by scientists around the world.

“Many of our competitors approached the challenge of using so-called Big Data to predict changes in mental health status from an a theoretical perspective, with the idea that with enough data, AI and Machine Learning would simply reveal the answers. But our model-based, conceptual approach has yielded what are, to date, probably the most powerful digital biomarker/prediction results in the field of mental health,” asserts Paul.

The second key differentiator is the composition of HealthRhythms’ founding team. While the founding team of most of its competitors is comprised of professionals with expertise in a single area, HealthRhythms’ founding team was equally divided between those with deep clinical expertise and experience and those with deep experience in behavioral sensing and mental health app development.

Paul further explains, “Today, our competitors fall primarily into three groups: companies that are capitalizing on the sensors built into smartphones to track behavior in patients with psychiatric disorders or symptoms, companies that are building on-line interventions or phone-based interventions for mental disorders, and companies that combine the tracking of behavioral and self-reported data with a clinician-facing tool or dashboard. However, as far as we are aware none has yet combined sensing, feedback to clinicians, and feedback to patients in the form of a highly personalized digital intervention platform that provides patients suggestions for behavior change based on their own sensed behavioral data.”

HealthRhythms’ products are built on validated theories of mental illness onset and resolution and take a four-part approach that rests on a) proprietary algorithms for turning the data from smartphone sensors into b) features that are significantly correlated with changes in symptom status, and the capacity to use those features to provide c) highly personalized suggestions, or micro-interventions for behavior change that are based on trends in the user’s own data that are d) significantly associated with improvement in symptom severity.

Fostering Positive Organizational Culture

Besides, top-notch offerings and optimal customer service, Paul believes that inspiring work culture is also vital to the success of an organization. Thus, he heavily focuses on cultivating an empowering and collaborating culture where each team member takes on an “ownership” mentality to work towards the common goal of transforming the reactive and costly mental healthcare model into a predictive and more cost-effective model. Paul notes that “Almost all the members of our team have a personal connection to mental health as a result of having a a family member or close personal friend who has suffered from a mental disorder. This translates into a deep, authentic commitment to our mission to take mental health measurement and intervention from an analog and reactive mode that is associated with the enormous human and financial cost to a digital, predictive, and preventive mode that saves both personal suffering and monetary expense.,”

The organization values an ownership mentality, enlightened leadership, growth mindset, transparency, resilience, diversity, and authenticity. Driven by these values, it strives to improve and enhance its client services at every turn. It works closely with its clients and ensures that its products and services meet their unique specifications and the highest standard for data security, protection of privacy, and fidelity of the signal.

Shaping the Future of Mental Healthcare

Forging ahead, HealthRhythms aims to continue working with the pharmaceutical company partners who are developing and testing innovative approaches to the treatment of mental disorders. However, at the same time, it is keenly focused on forming long-term partnerships with the major health systems and payors where the real opportunities to repair the broken approach to mental healthcare reside.

“We expect that within a few years HealthRhythms will have dramatically changed the way these institutions address the care of individuals with mental disorders and, especially, the care of those with chronic medical conditions complicated by the presence of a co-occurring mood disorder,” concludes Paul on an optimistic note.