Powering Mental Health Assessments with AI: An SMB’s Innovative Solution

Current mental healthcare screening practices are tedious and error-prone, which cuts into valuable time that healthcare providers could spend on treatment and care. Fortunately, Aiberry is one of the few small and medium businesses (SMBs) at the cutting edge of healthcare technology. Inspired by military applications, it has developed an advanced platform for assessing mental health. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to analyze user text, audio, and video cues, the platform can deliver a quantified risk score and other mental health insights in real time.

Committed to solving some of the biggest challenges in mental health, Aiberry’s AI is embedded into a secure experience that is used to assess disorders accurately and in the strictest confidence. The service has been validated by clinicians and Aiberry now has US patents pending.

Aiberry needed to overcome the challenge of balancing compliance standards with the ability to move-fast and fail-fast with AI in behavioral healthcare. They turned to Amazon Web Services so it could benefit from a HIPAA-complaint data infrastructure. Aiberry wanted a partner that could provide all the necessary ingredients for success including:

• Knowledge of US healthcare compliance requirements
• Experience in AI and ML
• The ability for practitioners to sign a Business Associate Agreement
• Ongoing expert support

“We need to ensure that we’re cost-efficient and focused on our core capabilities. We can’t drift away and build technology that’s not our forte,” says Lior Auslander, EVP Product and Technology (and Co-founder), at Aiberry.

AWS enables technological innovation in healthcare

Auslander says that Aiberry relies on having a technology environment that enables the company to explore, experiment, and develop rapidly. “When we started off, we wanted a one-stop-shop for all our needs in developing our capabilities, developing our platform, managing production, and good solutions for everything else we need,” explains Auslander.

That one-stop-shop is AWS. Auslander says the cost-efficiency, reliability, and scalability were all critical cloud-based features for Aiberry. But given the highly personal nature of the health service they provide, security was a major factor when choosing cloud service provider.

“We’re dealing with AI in one part of the equation and peoples’ lives on the other, so we set out with some clear principles as a business. We are dealing with very sensitive information about people and their health, so everything has to be totally secure,” says Auslander.

Training the AI models

Working with AWS, Aiberry has the reassurance that it has both the environment and support it needs to maintain its business and ethical principles. The company is very aware of public concerns about AI hallucinations and the false results the technology can produce. “You see some AI models today drifting away and that’s something we simply cannot allow,” asserts Auslander. “We are using our own data and this is where AWS really comes into play as we train our models.”

All of the data on the Aiberry platform is encrypted, all information is anonymized for analytics purposes, and any data used in the mental health screening process is deleted and removed. Aiberry is also confident of the accuracy of its health assessment, with the form-based processes and AI-powered technology it is using. “We’ve compared our models to the ‘gold standard’ and I’m happy to say that as of today, we are equivalent in accuracy to those standards,” says Auslander. “Ultimately, the forms are the forms and they have a glass ceiling. They won’t be more accurate than they are today. But our technology can be as we feed more data and we tweak our models.”

Embracing innovative technology

Auslander has some clear advice for other SMBs looking to embrace technology as an enabler of business growth. “First off is embrace cloud technology. As an SMB, you don’t want to start dealing with your own hardware and environments and having to hire people. Second is find a strong technology company, one that can bring relevant people depending on the context. And the last thing is stay savvy in technology.”

Want to know more about how Aiberry is growing in AWS Cloud? Watch this 13-minute fireside chat with Auslander on the AWS Connected Community, a free online community powered by its members where you can get free expert advice, training, and exclusive software offers. You may also contact us to learn more about our AI services for SMBs.