When people usually hear the term ‘healthy,’ they associate it with the physical overtone such as the absence of diseases, good cardiovascular levels, and many more.
But unfortunately, many so-called healthy people suffer from mental health problems. For them, help never comes because they either fail to seek it or lack appropriate knowledge.
Creating a safe space and making awareness of mental health has been the absolute aim of many companies providing services, Get A-Head is one such platform that aims to deliver head-on quality mental health care and training.
Under the driven leadership of Ahad Bandealy, Founder and CEO, the company has built comprehensive training and onboarding support. He has promoted and deeply believes in offering prices to help suit organizations of any size.
In an interview with Insights Care, Ahad talks about the foundation of Get A-Head and how the company has created an impact in the mental health industry.
Below are the highlights of the interview.
Ahad, please give us a brief overview of your journey as the CEO and Founder of Get A-Head.
While training as a practitioner and navigating the mental healthcare industry as a sufferer of depression, I recognized a few major inefficiencies in the mental health sector. These inefficiencies were threefold. Practitioner demand outpaced supply, clinical training was costly and time-consuming, and lastly, there was a failure to provide objective data regarding one’s mental health.
With the help of many others, I was empowered to create Get A-Head to solve these inefficiencies. Our company combines telehealth, practice management, and data analytic tools to offer a comprehensive platform that benefits service providers (supervisors, trainees, accredited clinicians) and clients.
What are the core values upon which your organization is built? What is the
the mission of your organization?
In business, these two terms (value and mission) are frequently used yet misunderstood and, honestly, abstract. While building this organization, I enrolled in an MBA program in Healthcare Technologies and Leadership at the Jack Welch Management Institute. It was my learnings at the Jack Welch Management Institute that led me to establish our company’s mission and the set of behaviors that guide our pursuit of it.
Our mission is to revolutionize how mental health services are delivered and how practitioners are trained by providing a software platform that helps train new practitioners, measure client outcomes, and improve effectiveness in the delivery of care.
The set of behaviors that guide our pursuit of this mission includes candor, the quest for knowledge and innovation, executing passion that is infectious, collaboration on each project, active listening, and empathy.
Tell us more about Get A-Head, its vision, and how it provides mental health
support and enhance clinical practice?
A large issue in the mental healthcare industry is the demand for mental healthcare outpacing the supply of service providers. Alleviating this problem starts with the supply of service providers. As it turns out, technology can play a significant role in equipping service providers to get through the accreditation process more efficiently by helping them learn better and faster
Practitioners are taught to pick up on nuances with patients, but with tools like our Natural Language Processing tool, they can pick up on so many more nuances that they wouldn’t otherwise. Our technology enables us in providing high-quality services to treat the increasingly large population of people seeking mental health services.
Elaborate more on the solutions and services that Get A-Head offers, and how are
These are making an impact on the mental healthcare industry.
The platform offers clients the ability to match with providers based on demographic attributes of their choosing, schedule audio, and video sessions through the platform, and have access to their own progress notes.
It offers clinician features such as the digital two-way mirror, which allows supervisors to support trainees in real-time, and natural language processing which provides a transcript of each session along with analytics that provides objective data revealing quantifiable insight into the client’s psychological and emotional state.
These features improve the efficiency of clinical training, promoting an increased
supply of mental health practitioners and therefore balancing the demand surplus. By providing practitioners with access to natural language processing transcription and analytics, this platform grants practitioners access to objective data that may help diagnose and treat clients and thereby increase the efficacy of care delivered.
What are the biggest challenges you have faced and the most important lessons you have learned in your vocation so far? What are the types of challenges that you still face to this day?
We are incredibly grateful to have been met with so much fortune throughout the development of this company. One of the most notable challenges we face is push-back, which is not uncommon in the pursuit of innovation. We understand that change is quite uncomfortable for most people, so we do our best to include those whose systems and processes we are innovating, in our decision-making. We host round-table discussions with our clients where we welcome conversations about what is working/what more might be needed.
A challenge that we face on a daily basis, as a player in the mental health industry, is responsible access. Mental healthcare is becoming an increasingly demanded resource, and it is up to us (and other fellow players in the industry) to create an evidence-based model to support these people. Our company is constantly fighting to close the supply and demand gap.
As an established industry leader, what would be your advice to the budding
entrepreneurs and enthusiasts aspiring to venture into the mental healthcare
industry?
Follow your passion and immerse yourself in the experience of those for whom you are trying to solve a problem. My personal experience as a patient in the mental healthcare system and my professional experience in business and as a practitioner-in-training prepared me to create a responsible solution in this space. Before you start a company in this space, try to grasp a good understanding of your users and the experiences that they face and then consider how you can solve their problems in a way that is based on evidence.
Too often, founders are rushed by the pressures to come out with an app or technology, without fully understanding the problem they are trying to solve. Failing to understand the problem and rushing to find a solution does a disservice to the communities we are trying to help and to ourselves. Ask yourself, “Am I’m creating or solving a problem by augmenting the work or improving an individual’s experience?”
How do you envision further strengthening Get A-Head stronghold in 2022 and
beyond?
We are looking forward to engaging in more partnerships, pushing the envelope on
innovative healthcare technologies and learning more about how the latest technologies can solve problems in the mental health industry. We are proud to offer some of the most innovative features in the industry, and we are excited to continue to offer even more as we grow.
We are interested in exploring additional data sources to improve mental healthcare’s efficacy. We are finding data from wearable technologies to be quite relevant in the context of mental health, along with data from personalized medical tests. We are excited by recent learnings about how saliva testing can yield data relevant to mental health.
