Neolth: mental health support for students and user engagement

Health Tech Matters: Talks About Healthcare Products and Design

In this episode, we are discussing what's so unique about the mental health programs for students, and early product adopters, and user engagement.

Our guest: Katherine Grill, PhD, CEO & Co-founder at Neolth.

Neolth provides on-demand, individualized mental health support for the 40 million high school and college students in the US.

Website: https://www.neolth.com/

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How to find me? Maria Borysova, healthcare product designer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-borysova/

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Quotes from the episode:

On mental health program for students vs adults

Students are digital natives, they digest content differently.

There are typical psycho-education and Coursera style modules that we've seen in some adult digital mental health platforms and they do not work well with the youth. They're used to YouTube, they're used to Tik Tok. They want short, digestible content that's really eye-catching and that's going to grab their attention, and they want things personalized and personalized in real-time. So everything from the language that you're using to the content that you're giving them is really going to be different on a youth mental health platform versus an adult mental health platform.

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On self-care tracking

Something else that we've found that works really well is self-care tracking.

And a lot of times youth and adults feel like, well, it doesn't count, I'm hanging out with my friends, I'm playing video games, I'm reading a book. All of these things can be a great way to relax and take care of your mental health. But because it's not a CBT or therapy or meditation, sometimes people think "well, it can't be helpful to my mental health. It doesn't really count." And that's just not accurate. On our platform, we are encouraging them to identify what they do for self-care. Like I said, whether it's exercise or video games, tracking that as well as much as you can.

Showing the youth, that there are lots of different ways beyond what's popular to improve your mental health and take care of yourself and that all of those things count and that they should be able to track those things and get credit for them. I think that can be really helpful.

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On finding your first customers

There's always going to be someone who's an early adopter. Especially for schools, there's a lot around the network effect and their reputation and who's innovative in this space, and who's supporting students, especially this year, around mental health.

That can not only be a way to improve the student's experience who are already enrolled at the school but perhaps a way to attract new students. There will always be some schools who say "I don't want to try this until 100, 500, 1000 other schools" are doing it." But then there will always be those people who are the early adopters and who want to be the first or who want to be one of the first. So the key, I think, is just finding those early adopters and then building that good relationship with them.