Ellipsis Health Announces Rising Higher, New Voice-Based App, to Help Healthcare Providers Identify and Manage Behavioral Health at Scale

Rising Higher Generates a Machine-Learning-Based Assessment of Anxiety and Depression Symptoms Through Analysis of Patient Speech

Ellipsis Health, pioneer of the first commercial-grade voice-based vital signs to quantify and manage depression and anxiety symptoms at scale, has announced the general availability of the Rising Higher mobile app. Rising Higher is a clinical decision support tool that enables healthcare providers and payors to remotely monitor symptoms in high-risk patient populations. Rising Higher creates behavioral health vital signs by detecting anxiety or depression symptoms via dual acoustic and semantic-based assessments of patient speech – providing critical behavioral health screening as well as monitoring between clinical encounters to improve health outcomes.

“At Ellipsis Health, our goal is for every person to have access to mental health professionals and treatment, as we work to eliminate the stigma related to behavioral health issues,” said Mainul Mondal, Founder and CEO, Ellipsis Health. “Healthcare providers alone do not have the bandwidth to solve the problem at scale – but by leveraging the ubiquity of smartphones, behavioral health measurement is now available anytime, anywhere through our Rising Higher app. This groundbreaking development in the quantification of depression and anxiety symptoms is revolutionizing patient care and improves quality of life for Americans seeking help for mental illness.”

The onset of COVID-19 has highlighted both the immediate value and long-term need for a scalable solution to identify behavioral health symptoms. Representative panel surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assess mental health during the pandemic among adults found that 40.9% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition, including symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder (30.9%), a considerable increase compared with the same period in 2019.

“The Rising Higher app addresses two critical care gaps in the behavioral health patient journey – upstream screening and downstream monitoring,” said Dr. Michael Aratow, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, Ellipsis Health. “Since our current system has a major reliance on self-reporting or recognition by non-behavioral health providers, too many patients receive treatment too late. Even for patients that are diagnosed, clinicians have little insight into a patient’s life outside of a clinical encounter with few early warning signs of deterioration or relapse. Ellipsis Health’s speech-based vital signs enable providers to identify people that need assistance much sooner and gain visibility into their mental states over time in a consistent and scalable manner.”

Ellipsis Health’s cloud-based machine learning algorithms assess patients’ voice data and generate predictions of depression, anxiety or other behavioral health conditions. The HIPAA-compliant platform facilitates longitudinal visibility into these behavioral health symptoms for enhanced clinical decision support.

“Our scalable deep learning models harness tone of voice, speech acoustics and natural language to predict a patient’s behavioral health state,” explained Elizabeth Shriberg, PhD, Chief Science Officer at Ellipsis Health. “Rich analytics output is produced based on only a short sample of speech from the patient. The analytics are made available in real time to the patient’s care team.”

Ellipsis Health’s Rising Higher app is available in the Apple Store and Google Play app stores. Integration with third-party mobile apps, web apps, and APIs is also available.