Brain and mental health

Brain and mental well-being are critical to the health and happiness of the 7.5 billion people who inhabit our planet. The way we feel, solve problems, and interact with one another all depend on the health of our brains. Unfortunately, brain disorders that compromise our mental and cognitive function are strikingly common, affecting 10 percent of the world’s population and 20 percent of children and adolescents. These mental, neurological, and substance-use disorders can occur at any stage of life, from early childhood to adulthood, and are increasingly common. Treatment is inadequate or nonexistent in many parts of the world, especially in low-income countries. 

The most common mental disorder—depression—is the third leading cause of disease burden worldwide and a major contributor to suicide, which took the lives of 800,000 people in 2015 alone. Degenerative neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease affect sufferers’ learning, memory, and perception and put an emotional and financial strain on their caregivers. Substance-use disorders affect over 15 million people worldwide, accounting for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. 

The diminished productivity created by brain disorders amounts to more than 10 billion lost days of work globally per year, or about US $1 trillion in lost economic output—not including the cost of treatment. Further, brain disorders can substantially affect physical health. They are linked to unhealthy behaviors like poor diet and lack of exercise, which can lead to chronic diseases that are expensive to treat and sometimes fatal. 

Great opportunity exists to substantially improve brain health and reduce mental, neurological, and substance-use disorders. Technology can provide a pathway for introducing faster and more accurate diagnoses and more effective, accessible, and scalable treatments. Solutions that empower people to improve their overall brain wellness—integral to preventing brain disorders, enhancing brain functionality, and enabling people to live happy and productive lives—are beginning to appear, and there is space for many more. Shifting the conversation from treating brain diseases to improving well-being may begin to dissolve the cultural stigma that makes it difficult for many to seek help.

Brain and mental health platform provides scalable technology solutions that:

 Empower people anywhere in the world to improve their overall brain health and fitness, mental well-being, and mental resilience

• Enable earlier and more accurate diagnosis of problems
• Increase access to and efficacy of treatments
• Help build a positive, stigma-free culture in which all people feel empowered to proactively seek better brain health and mental fitness

Brain and mental health platform implements an innovative, simple and cost efficient approach to treating impoverished African women who suffer from depression. Our model is based on group interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT-G) and is facilitated by lay community workers. IPT-G is a proven technique, supported by clinical trial success in Africa. Our solution is to train lay community workers in IPT-G to become mental health facilitators who in turn run their own depression groups. This unique, structured model runs for over three months to help group members identify and manage their interpersonal difficulties, ultimately reducing their symptoms of depression.

African women with depression who participate in our program experience marked reduction in their depression symptoms, with the vast majority of these women being considered depression-free when assessed using the PHQ-9 (Patient Health Questionnaire) depression diagnostic tool at the completion of therapy. They also form strong social bonds with 81% of groups continuing to meet when Brain and mental health formal facilitation ends. This continuation permits participants to reinforce the skills they have learned, building resilience and managing future depressive episodes.

The World Health Organization estimates some 300 million people suffering from depression worldwide. Many of these people occur in low and middle income countries were mental health services are chronically under-resourced or not available. In just three years of field work, we have treated almost 10,000 women with depression. In the next three years, we will treat 100,000 African women with depression, demonstrating the potential for our model to be significantly scaled. We also continue to partner with new with existing non-governmental organizations who will be able to replicate our model both within Africa and abroad. 

The solution serves three sections of the community; youth population to develop capacity and skills to earn livelihood locally, women community to earn income and respect, and village community members to benefit from improved primary healthcare delivery model.

We aim to scale up the inclusive model leveraging the captive customer base of Health is wealth and other partners in the network across 20 districts in 5 different states in India and empower 2000 CHWs within 5 years of deployment of the initiative.

To expand the reach of the care delivery model, the initiative through CHWs will work through different delivery modes. At an household level, CHWs will provide antenatal checkup, nutritional counseling, and screening for high risk pregnancy and development delays in children (0-2 years), through health camps, the village community will get access to information and awareness on health, sanitation and awareness and through hub clinics, the community through CHWs will get access to tertiary referral care. Through different touch points, established by these CHWs, the rural and remotest community will get access to integrated care at reduced cost and distance 

Brain and mental health project team comprises of experienced health information, monitoring & evaluation specialist, medical experts and a software engineer drawn from multi-sector organizations (Nasarawa State Primary Healthcare Development Agency, Data Colab) that can influence and build necessary collaborations and engagements. The Symptor development team is located at Lafia in Nasarawa state Nigeria, at the implementation community.

The aggregate experiences of the team members across healthcare projects has vastly engaged with the community and stakeholders in understanding patient need and usability in building usability and partnerships. Having worked with understanding health data requirements at different levels, the team has worked with caseworkers, frontline health workers and primary healthcare centers in the region to understand and integrate a suitable workflow into Symptor.

In addition, we are engaging digital transformation principles in co-designing of Symptor with all stakeholders taking peculiarities of technological exposure of potential users, usability, and familiarity of process flow with Symptor workflow.

Brain and mental health  Platform  is designed to promote human-centered values perfectly.  We are transitioning from a conventional “one size fits all” education model to an active, personalized “learner-centered” model.  Everyone is in charge of their own learning. Using Planet Learning, everyone, with any device that can open a browser, has a personal dashboard with the things they are reading or watching, the courses they are taking, the learning teams in which they are participating and a record of their ongoing learning achievements.  Furthermore, all learners are strongly encouraged to create and share their own resources, including their essays, stories, artwork and music. 

Brain and mental health  Planet Learning is personalized, scalable, and deployable at low cost. Used in our Community Learning Centers, it offers disadvantaged youth large quantities of multi-media resources and self-paced career pathways in education, healthcare, entrepreneurship, ICT, food and agriculture, and public safety, that easily combine with local content and needs. Periodically, linked to the Internet, the system offers updates and connection responsive to changing circumstances. It works primarily off the internet on any device that can open a browser. The system can be contained in a small wheeled suitcase, or backpack, and be up and running in less than a minute.

Brain and mental Health is committed to forming constructive, thoughtful partnerships to share resources, build upon our technological capacity and achieve our ambitious organizational goals. 

By being a Solver, we will have the opportunity to connect and partner with technology thought leaders and groups that will help us refine and grow our innovative solution to depression in Africa.

The majority of a person’s health needs—physical, mental, and social—are addressed by primary health care. Primary health care attends not only to individuals and families but also to the overall well-being of communities and their populations.

Despite its foundational role in communities everywhere, primary health care remains out of reach for millions of people, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Barriers such as high cost, lack of access, insufficient availability, and inconsistent quality of care hold back people from living healthy and productive lives. 

Brain and health mental model is innovative in that it trains lay community workers to become Mental Health Facilitators and run Brains and health Therapy Groups using group interpersonal psychotherapy. 

We use electronic tablets to screen patients for depression using app-based depression diagnostic tools. We also use  technology to track baseline, midline and end-line depression scores for our participants so that we can monitor their progress and focus our treatment methods on them.  

Brain and Health is innovative in that it is the only organization implementing a scalable solution to the depression epidemic in Africa. 

Over the next 12 months we seek to partner with leading NGOs that work with community health workers to build an adapted version of Health is Wealth, which will be tested and deployed at the field. Our key objective will be to achieve proof of concept among CHWs and drug shop dispensaries for our solution. This entails testing, deploying and validating our solution together with strong partners on the ground. Our focus will be on Sub-saharan Africa.

We want to make it easy for anyone, anywhere to access trusted medical expertise and high-quality care, tailored to their individual needs. Our vision is to empower patients and frontline health workers to take better informed health decisions and to enable access to appropriate and timely care in LMIC. Over the next 3-5 years we seek to reach over 20 Million people, directly as Health is wealth users as well as indirectly through frontline health workers. In addition, we aim to impact lives positively, through the use of patient analytics and aggregated, real-time populations insights, which allow for effective outbreak control.

• Outcome: Number of women treated for depression Measurement Plan: Measured through organizational record keeping  
• Outcome: % of participants that are depression-free immediately after therapy Measurement Plan: Collected on tablets using the Medic Mobile app and PHQ-9 depression diagnostic tool  
• Outcome: % of participants that are depression-free six months after therapy Measurement Plan: Collected on tablets using the Medic Mobile app and the PHQ-9 depression diagnostic tool

Our theory of change includes embracing variability in Providing access to improvement of Brain and mental health wellbeing in low- and middle-income countries, clinical research for those currently underserved in low- and middle-income countries, supporting medical providers to strengthen health systems in vulnerable communities worldwide, connecting physicians and healthcare providers worldwide, building relationships, collaborations, and share resources to improve patient health and long-term outcomes.
To achieve this, we are currently working on a pilot with Village Health Workers (VHWs) in partnership with Nasarawa State University Nigeria  in two communities in Nigeria. Here, our partners have integrated pre-assessment quizzes on all courses and are working with surveys for the purpose of gathering baseline data as well, all within the Planet Learning system. Additionally, we are developing a proposed pilot for Somalia that employs Planet Learning to help Somali refugees in Dadaab, Kenya to become “Ready to Return” and, at the same time, provides the conditions in selected Somali communities that enable them to become “Peace Building Communities” functioning as “magnets” for the Ready to Return refugees in Dadaab. Tracking improvement with baseline data is essential in this six to twelve month development program to prepare Somali refugees to become skilled in a trade or service as team member in a Peace Building Community.

There are two core technology that powers our solution.

• Digital systems (machine learning, control systems, big data)

• Management & design approaches

The initiative will develop a strong product supply chain system to scale up the inclusive solution to meet the wide diversity of needs (both health and lifestyle products) of the rural underserved populations and help CHWs to break even.  Leveraging the methodical livelihood generation schemes offered by iKure(through the above listed revenue streams), these CHWs will promote various products and services through mobile based supply chain application and make them accessible to all even in hard-to-reach communities. Furthermore through strategic partnership with key supporting organizations, across sectors such as businesses, NGOs, philanthropists, and academia, the existing ecosystem partnership of iKure will play a pioneering role in business development, customer acquisitions and building on a robust network in respective community.

Health care involves a diverse set of public and private data collection systems, including health surveys, administrative enrollment and billing records, and medical records, used by various entities, including hospitals, CHCs, physicians, and health plans.Data on race, ethnicity, and language are collected, to some extent, by all these entities, suggesting the potential of each to contribute information on patients or enrollees.Community health workers are front-line providers of care for underserved and disadvantaged groups (Taylor, 2004) and therefore are good settings for implementing quality improvement strategies aimed at reducing racial and ethnic disparities in care.while CHCs serve diverse patient populations and, as organizations, understand the importance of demographic data for improving the quality of care, the accuracy of the race, ethnicity, and language data they collect may be limited (Maizlish and Herrera, 2006). More than 87 percent of surveyed CHCs reported inquiring about a patient's need for language services, and 73 percent reported recording this information in the patient record (Gallegos et al., 2008); less is known, however, about the extent to which CHCs consistently collect patient race and ethnicity data beyond the basic Office of Management and Budget (OMB) categories included in their national Uniform Data System.

Our organization was founded on a simple premise—that people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live a healthy, productive life. We are working toward a future that is more diverse, equitable, and inclusive for all.

In 2021, we published our diversity, equity, and inclusion Commitment Statement(The ability to enjoy good health, secure greater educational outcomes, and move and stay out of poverty is unimpeded by race, gender, or other human differences, we will be living in that future) and developed our first diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategic framework, which lays out our plans for achieving transformational outcomes through increased diversity of talent, equitable practices, and an inclusive culture. The framework aims for systemic change across four pillars: Leadership Accountability, Talent, Culture, and Partnerships & Voice.

We believe that we simply cannot achieve our desired impact without focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion internally and with our partners. This begins with taking an earnest look at our shortcomings as well as our accomplishments.

We’ve grown word of mouth from Patients to Patients with zero marketing budget in the last 2 years showing that there is a market need for Talking Points. Our cost of customer acquisition has therefore been 0. If you’re a Hospital or Hospital district or any other institution, we charge to be on our platform through software licensing fees - on a per Patients basis for the  year. Our revenue has grown so far without a sales team and solely driven by inbound requests, and we believe that this can grow this significantly in the next 5 years through outbound sales and with more resources devoted to it and a coherent sales strategy. Despite being a non-profit, 15% of our operating budget was via earned income (v. 10% in 2016), our 2025 goal is to reach 20%, and by 2030 to 50%.

The healthcare delivery model offers various Business  model streams to make it self-sustainable in the long run which includes:

• Doctor’s consultation fees
• Issuing of Digital health cards
• Services obtained through diagnostic facility
• Services obtained through Pathology lab
• Telemedicine Services
• Services obtained by CHWs for door step healthcare delivery
• Power testing, selling of eye glasses, medicines and nutritional supplements
• Services obtained through tertiary linkages

We also have other revenue models

• loan fees on top for loans requested,
• 1% withdrawal fees by healthcare providers
• 1% Cost of Funds payable by the bank
• Commission from direct mobile money payments

With all these channels of revenue, we will breakeven within 15 months with our initial investment of USD 500,000. We will then generate a profit of about USD 200,000 within the next 6 months with a high growth rate. This profit will then be injected back into the business for expansion and growth to other potential markets

Brain and mental health continues to secure funding from private foundations, individual donations and bilateral government grants. Since commencing operations in 2017 we have raised almost $0.1 million to research, pilot and grow our solution. We have over five foundation partners that currently fund our work and have received a bilateral grant from the Canadian Government.

From 2017-2019 we will raise a total $0.02 million to scale our program, reaching 100,000 African women with depression across two countries. We will further diversify our funding streams ensuring that high-net-worth individuals and bilateral grants each make up 20% of our total revenue, with the remaining 60% of financial support obtained from new and existing foundation partners.

Currently, we are bootstrapping and utilizing our own resources to meet our next milestones of setting up clinical trials.  Once the clinical trials are planned, we will look for pre-seed / seed stage funding to carry out the trials and maturing the therapy system to the commercial level.