START - Psychiatric Symptom Tracker and Resources for Treatment

Background & Unmet Need

• The COVID-19 pandemic put an extreme burden on frontline healthcare workers: recent data suggests that nearly half of them are at risk of developing clinically significant psychiatric symptoms
• It is unclear how mood, anxiety, and trauma symptoms develop over time and why some individuals are affected, while others exposed to the same stressors and traumas are spared
• Most studies and monitoring tools rely solely on self-reported assessments of mood, anxiety, and trauma, and are noisy and subjective
• Identifying modifiable risk factors could help support healthcare workers and other at-risk populations and design effective interventions
• Unmet Need: Tools for healthcare workers and other people at risk for adverse psychiatric outcomes to monitor their mental health and access convenient treatment options

Technology Overview

• The Technology: An efficient, easy-to-use online tool that objectively measures mood, anxiety, and trauma symptoms, provides immediate feedback to participants, allows tracking mental health over time, and connects users with existing mental health resources
• The START tool was developed using novel machine learning methods and a large dataset of fMRI scans of >1,200 patients with mood and anxiety disorders
• Self-reported clinical symptoms are denoised using a proprietary method and projected into a low-dimensional space constrained by brain biology, producing quantitative scores reliably quantifying mood-related brain circuit functions
• PoC Data: In a pilot study, implementation of START led to a significant increase (>2x) in utilization of urgent counseling services, leading to numerous referrals

Technology Applications

• Monitoring mental health state of healthcare workers and other at-risk populations
• Connecting at-risk individuals to treatment resources
• Personalized cognitive behavioral therapy in conjunction with digital mental health apps
• Providing measurable psychiatric endpoints in clinical trials for drug development
• Studying psychiatric symptoms in large populations

Technology Advantages

• Instant, easily understood feedback and psychiatric scores on mood, anxiety, sleep, stress, trauma, and burnout risk
• Symptom scores can be tracked over time
• Questions are adaptively selected to generate reliable validated scores in the shortest time
• Data is denoised using proprietary machine learning algorithms, making predictions more reliable