About HealthRhythms

About HealthRhythms and Our Mission

HealthRhythms is on a mission to become the world’s number one solution for detecting clinically meaningful changes in behavioral health. Pioneered by a team of successful startup founders and internationally-recognized leaders in tech, business, and medicine, HealthRhythms is redefining how mental health is understood and managed in the twenty-first century.

Mental health has been neglected the world over, yet it is central to everything we do.  We want to change that. Our mission is to redefine not only how we measure and treat mental illness, but how we optimize well-being as a whole. We are making it easy to measure and care for everyone’s mental health. 

Pioneered by a team of highly successful startup founders and leaders in tech, business, and medicine - including Harvard and Stanford trained proven entrepreneurs, University of Pittsburgh and University of Pennsylvania physicians, MIT Media Lab and Cornell-trained technologists - HealthRhythms hopes to redefine how behavioral health is understood and managed in the 21st century.

We use signals from mobile phones and other devices to understand behavioral health and treat mental health conditions. Some of our important work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health. 

Values

Our values set us apart from other companies, while setting us all up for success. More about this can be found in Culture

• Ownership Mentality

• Growth Mindset

• Judgment

• Transparency and Candor

• Bias for Action

• Empathy

• Innovation

• Team Player

• Diversity and Inclusion

• Integrity

Every employee that joins HealthRhythms is given a copy of  Mindset by Carol Dweck and No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings. These books are referenced often in our conversations about culture.

HealthRhythms is a Social Impact Organization

The unmet need: In contrast to all other areas of medicine, up until now mental health has been largely reliant on subjective patient self-report. This contributes to reduced quality of care and poorer treatment outcomes, leading to higher dropout rates, ER visits, hospitalizations, etc. Mental health clinicians need objective, continuously collected and easily interpretable patient data to fully appreciate patient status and enable quick, flexible, and targeted interventions. Patients and families need information that can help them to manage their own illness in a more effective manner. 

HealthRhythms is on a mission to become the world leader in objectively measuring mental health. We do this by capturing critical behavioral information -- from sleep/wake rhythms, and physical activity, to social engagement (patterns of out-of-home activity, patterns of technology use and screen time, etc.) and more -- to provide a more complete picture of individuals’ behavioral health with clinically actionable insight.

Mental health clinicians, health systems and payers need objective, continuously collected and easily interpretable patient data to fully appreciate patient status and enable quick, flexible, and targeted interventions that lead to positive outcomes and reduced treatment costs. Patients, and their families, need information that can help them to manage their own illness in a more effective manner. 

It is time to re-imagine what the next generation of mental health care as universal health care can look like.

• This is a universal human problem - not local, not cultural, not tribal, this extends across all of humanity; there are different cultural expressions and it hits different cultures differently but we can bring a universal understanding to this

• If we can make the nature of this empirical and not invisible suffering then it is validating and we can remove the stigma associated with mental illness 

• Imagine if your personal devices could really know you, know you in the sense of tracking a rich set of behaviors to continuously, accurately assess your mental health

• Imagine that machine learning translates that intimate knowledge of your daily behaviors into precise suggestions for behavior change that lead to improvement in symptoms of depression, anxiety and other mental disorders. This is the promise of digital phenotyping. 

• Just as digital biomarkers can transform human access to mental health self-care, digital biomarkers can transform clinical support of more acute populations where there is a great unmet need.

• Our solutions ensure equity of access: they are accessible to anyone who owns a smartphone and has a connectivity contract or access WiFi.  Our digital intervention platforms are accessible wherever there is cellular signal or WiFi available, bringing validated intervention to those who for either financial or geographic reasons do not have access to care.