#StartupsEverywhere Profile Katherine Grill, Co-Founder & CEO, Neolth
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Equipping students and schools with mental health resources
Neolth works to increase access to mental health support for students by offering technology solutions in schools, youth, and healthcare organizations. Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Katherine Grill spoke with us about her work within the intersection of education and healthcare, the challenges of navigating privacy laws and stigma, and what she hopes to achieve next.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Neolth?
I’m trained as a therapist working in psychiatric care and I have my doctorate in behavioral neuroscience. In the past, I’ve done some National Institute of Health (NIH) research and worked at Children’s National Hospital. Through my time in clinical care, research, and as a university professor, I learned about the importance of evidence-based programs, ethics in healthcare, and patient-centered treatment. Academia, however, was limited as far as taking a health program to scale and creating widespread impact in the community. I wanted to make mental health care more accessible for teens and young adults, in particular. In 2017, I figured I’d take a leap, leave my job at Children's National, and move to Silicon Valley to see what I could learn about digital health. Initially, I thought I would join another company, but there was a gap in the market for evidence-based programs in the realm of teen mental health, so I founded Neolth.
What is the work you are doing at Neolth?
We’ve built a self-guided mobile application that provides mental health education, coping skills, relaxation practices, stigma reduction, and crisis monitoring to teens and young adults. We typically work through schools, who buy our solution and provide it to students as a health and wellness service or as part of their mental health curriculum. This past year, we’ve seen a lot of funding from the Department of Education coming into schools for mental health education mandates. That's been fantastic, but, like in other policy areas that are seeing increased attention, we need to make sure that politicians talk to people in the mental health and education fields before they solidify those policies. Sometimes policies miss out on important components, like ensuring schools provide Tier 1 mental health support. Rather than waiting until a student needs therapy or crisis care, Tier 1 support is preventative. Hearing from experts like the Surgeon General, who is currently advocating for more preventative, school-based mental health resources, can help politicians make the most informed and comprehensive policies.
How does your app collect data? How did your privacy concerns shape the way you built Neolth?
We don't interface with medical or school records—we just collect information that’s self-reported from the students. Students, along with their parents and school counselors, can decide how much they want to share about their health needs. The more information we get, the more precisely our program is able to curate content and personalize mental health resources for them. But it is really up to the individual user and how much data they decide to give us.
We have a great legal team that specializes in digital health and children’s privacy, and I come from a background working with protected health information (PHI). Our team is familiar with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)—it's a world that we’ve lived in for a while—but I can see other startups viewing privacy frameworks, especially around health data, as complex. Typically, when you partner with a school, you do need to provide them documentation around your privacy policy; and that policy needs to adhere to standards like COPPA. It’s important to respect these frameworks, because they exist to protect children. Since we're not sharing data with any third parties and the end-user can control how much data we collect, we're considered low risk on the data privacy side.
How has your team been able to navigate the plethora of privacy frameworks that exist within the health and education sectors? What observations have you made in the process?
Working with children, our priority is protecting their data. We don’t sell information to third parties, for example. In general, because we have a good team who's done this before, it made the process of navigating privacy frameworks easier for us. We worked with our counsel at Latham and Watkins to create our terms of service and work with our school customers on any state-specific addendums. Having various laws makes this process a little harder, so it would definitely be nice if there was just one standardized privacy law.
One thing we’ve heard from startup founders in the education space is that there are often significant barriers to entry to working with schools or students. What has your experience been like?
This is always an issue in healthcare and education. I work at the intersection of both, and they are probably two of the slowest-moving fields to adapt to new technology. Personally, it's something I'm used to. The reality is that the more we can encourage the schools to innovate, the better, and a lot of that comes from policy. COVID-19 actually pushed schools forward into the mental health and technology conversation. At the beginning of the pandemic, as we were having conversations with schools, we got a lot of feedback saying that mental health wasn’t a priority. Return to campus plans focused on physical health, at the detriment of students who greatly needed mental health support. And before the pandemic administrators asked, “Why would I have something that's a digital resource if healthcare is accessible on campus through our center? We're never going to be remote.” Two years into the pandemic, schools are willing to be more innovative when it comes to technology and prioritizing mental health. But there are still schools and institutions that wait until the Department of Education puts forth mandates. I believe there's a way to incentivize schools to be more proactive about adopting technology and providing mental health support to students. Waiting until students are depressed or in crisis is the wrong approach. It’s not only risky, but as a clinician, I’d argue it’s unethical. Technology enables schools to provide affordable, easy-to-use Tier 1 support. The more policy we have that emphasizes preventative, school-based resources, the more protected our children will be.
What are your goals for Neolth moving forward?
Our mission is to increase access to care for young people. The more we can provide support that's accessible, engaging, and that helps them overcome stigma, the better. One of the ways to get there is through mental health education, making it a part of students’ day to day lives. A lot of people mistakenly think that mental health support should come solely from the parents or healthcare providers, but teenagers are typically uncomfortable talking to their parents about these things, even if they have a good relationship. They also only see their doctors once or twice a year, and often won’t have as strong a relationship with them compared to the teachers and counselors at school who they're seeing on a day-to-day basis. This means teens are less willing to follow recommendations from doctors or parents. We've done a lot of research with our teens, and found that 87 percent of them prefer to get their mental health support through school. Only 67 percent want to get it through a doctor, which is surprising for a lot of people to hear. Then when it's parents, it drops down to 16 percent of teens who want to receive a referral for mental health support. Schools are absolutely the best channel to get them comfortable with mental health. We want to have mental health be part of the curriculum, and make sure that lawmakers are speaking to kids about what would be engaging for them and to health and education professionals about what should be in the curriculum.
We’ve seen mandates come out that encompass bits and pieces of student mental health, but not everything. Making sure that there is co-development, or a collaborative approach to making mandates when we're thinking about curriculum integration, along with providing funds for access to care, is crucial. Students tell us time and time again that it doesn't matter how many school counselors there are, they don’t want to reach out because of stigma. However, a lot of funds go to hiring more counselors or teletherapy. Those resources are absolutely needed, but there are many teens who won’t utilize them because of stigma. And that stigma disproportionately affects students of color. When politicians are making funding allocations, they need to consider this so they don’t create care inequities. We know that getting students on an app like ours, on something digital where they're comfortable, can be a stepping stone to them seeking help from trusted adults. Mobile apps provide a way to identify and care for students who are falling through the cracks. They ensure that every child has on-demand support for mental health education and stigma reduction while simultaneously providing 24/7 crisis monitoring and seamless care escalation to school counselors or therapists. It’s the comprehensive support that our children deserve.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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