The world faces another silent public health crisis that is increasing and that has institutions and specialists on alert, it is the deterioration of mental health. This has been noted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its most recent report, which warns that, after the pandemic, cases of anxiety and depression globally have grown by 25%.
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The phenomenon is also contrasted with the Colombian reality, since the situation requires solid efforts so that the population not only manages to overcome the negative effects left by the health emergency, but also the economic, social and family problems that are decisive in the state of mind.
National figures are in the red. According to a report from Legal Medicine, in the first half of 2022 an average of 7 suicides per day was reported. The National Institute of Health (INS), with a cut to September, also indicates that currently 95 people every day try to end their lives.
Seeing this panorama and to respond to this problem, Juan David Gutiérrez, a young Colombian entrepreneur, CEO and founder of the HealthTech MedByte created the first software, unique in the world, that, through artificial intelligence, predicts and monitors mental health risks.
This is Medbyte Care, a digital solution that emerged ten months ago and that identifies the probability that a person will suffer a crisis that affects their mental health in the future (up to 6 months before presenting).
According to Gutiérrez, in addition to detecting preventively the probability of risk that people have of developing mental health problems, “the digital solution intervenes in a precise and strategic way to lead them to a path of well-being long before it has negative consequences for them and others around them”, and adds: “the platform allows massive and preventive monitoring of thousands of people from automatically and carrying out prediagnosis of risk in a personalized and automated way”.
How does it work?
- The software identifies, after a previous analysisdifferent indicators of the person, such as personal conditions, environment and history to detect patterns that can negatively affect them.
- When obtaining the results, a communication is established by a chatbot that determines the urgency of the risk with a simple conversation.
- This analysis is received by a mental health professional (psychologist and psychiatrist) that, thanks to the information provided by the tool, it can make a clinical diagnosis and offer the person a psychological treatment tailored to their case based on telemedicine consultations, well-being calls, home visits, face-to-face appointments and, if necessary, I also need group sessions.
Gutiérrez is emphatic in affirming that “by itself the system does not prevent the disease, but thanks to the rapid communication it allows contacting high-risk people with specialists so that they can be treated or intervened on time.”
Among the mental health episodes identified by this new digital solution are anxiety, depression, work stress, suicide, personality and eating disorders, as well as self-harm and physical harm to others.
This scientific and technological advance is a great novelty for the field of medicine and comes at a time when the country urgently needs to advance measures that improve people’s quality of life.
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To date it is mainly available to health specialists, universities, companies with large numbers of employees and public organizations through the website https://medbyte.co/.
