- Care providers’ cultural attunement deficiency is a historic mental health care barrier for racial and ethnic minority communities, while bias remains a top pain point for healthcare AI
- Conversational AI visionary mpathic is building culturally competent AI models for more equitable mental healthcare delivery, rooted in part in Wave’s inclusive provider-patient transcripts
- NIH SBIR’s mission is to cultivate diverse ideas and strive to empower scientists and entrepreneurs to bring their discoveries to patients
mpathic, a leader in AI-powered actionable conversation analytics specializing in healthcare, life sciences, and client services, today announced it has received a highly competitive National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award for its transformative project “Empathy for Everyone: Generative AI that Improves Patient-Provider Cultural Attunement in Real Time.”
NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, offers SBIR grants to innovative small healthcare and life sciences businesses to perform research and development to make medical breakthroughs that can be deployed to the masses. This grant will fund the expansion of mpathic’s generative AI tools to facilitate cultural attunement between mental health providers and patients, bridge the gap in mental healthcare for underserved racial and ethnic populations, and potentially improve therapeutic outcomes and patient satisfaction.
America’s mental healthcare system is failing people of color. Racial and ethnic minority communities report higher rates of mental illness compared to white and privileged communities. Marginalized communities are also less likely to seek treatment, less likely to find or access high-quality care, and less likely to finish treatment, with 30-57% of patients prematurely leaving. These same communities often feel that mental health clinicians lack cultural attunement – where a clinician is understanding and responsive to the intersection of societal context, culture, and power of the patient’s lived experience, and are ill-equipped to respond to their mental health needs in an empathetic and affirming manner. Cultural attunement has been shown to be the driving factor that retains racial and ethnic minorities in mental healthcare.
Many digital health innovations are intended to improve patient-clinician relationships and the overall patient experience, including AI-powered technologies such as chatbots and ambient AI assistants. Unfortunately, many fall far short in closing care gaps. Male-dominant hetero-white language is the internet’s most prevalent language and is the foundation for widely used health technology AI models. This has led to a proliferation of AI innovations that are racist, sexist, and genderist when interacting with patients.
mpathic realizes that all mental health providers must be equipped with tools that address cultural attunement and health disparities, and it’s course-correcting the racial and ethnic bias prevalent in mental health AI models. mpathic is the first company of its kind to build a conversational analytics platform to detect and correct for cultural attunement in real time with natural language processing (NLP) and generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. mpathic is utilizing Wave’s provider-patient appointment transcripts to build its AI model.
“For too long, mental health care has not adequately considered the cultural context of patients,” shared Dr. Grin Lord, CEO and founder of mpathic. “With AI assistance that brings the best expertise in cultural attunement to any provider, we can create more meaningful and effective interventions that respect cultural nuances.”
mpathic will employ AI and NLP processing on conversational data from 300 30-minute health coaching sessions from Wave to improve cultural attunement in real-time provider-patient interactions. Wave delivers personalized virtual mental health care through a combination of an app-based digital experience and certified mental health coaches. Wave’s inclusive design processes and equitable hiring practices have supported an 85% non-white, non-male and non-straight team of therapists, coaches and care navigators, lending itself to an equally diverse user population and coaching session transcript data.
“Our collaboration with mpathic on this project is not just about technological innovation; it’s a step towards true access to mental health care that recognizes and adapts to the diversity of human culture,” said Dr. Sarah Adler, founder & CEO of Wave. “It’s about creating tools that enable us to see each patient more fully and meet them where they are, with respect, humility, and understanding.”
The SBIR Phase I project is headed by a team of experts in psychology and technology, including Alison Cerezo, Ph.D., Grin Lord, Psy.D., Amber Jolley-Paige, Ph.D., Jay Palat, M.S., and Tad Hirsch, Ph.D., at mpathic, alongside collaborators Sarah Adler, Ph.D., and Alison Pickover, Ph.D., from Wave.
“This SBIR award is a significant milestone for mpathic and speaks to our team’s innovative spirit and dedication,” said Dr. Alison Cerezo, SVP of Research & Health Equity at mpathic. “Through the research, we aim not only to improve mental health outcomes but to ensure that our mental health systems are equitable, inclusive, and responsive to the needs of all individuals, particularly those from marginalized communities.”
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