What You Should Know:
– mpathic, the leader in AI-powered actionable conversation analytics specializing in healthcare, life sciences, and client services was recently awarded an NIH SBIR grant to address racial bias in mental healthcare AI.
– The prestigious grant will support the development of a groundbreaking project titled “Empathy for Everyone: Generative AI that Improves Patient-Provider Cultural Attunement in Real Time.” mpathic wants all mental health providers to address cultural attunement and health disparities. Its conversational analytics platform detects and corrects for cultural attunement in real-time with NLP and generative AI.
Addressing Disparities in Mental Healthcare
The NIH grant recognizes the critical need to address racial and ethnic disparities in mental healthcare access and outcomes. Minority communities face significant challenges:
- Higher rates of mental illness compared to white populations.
- Lower rates of seeking and completing treatment, with 30-57% of patients prematurely leaving care.
- Difficulty finding culturally attuned providers who understand the intersection of societal context, culture, and patients’ lived experiences.
Cultural Attunement: The Key to Improved Outcomes
Research demonstrates that cultural attunement is a critical factor in retaining minority patients in mental healthcare. Culturally attuned providers create an environment where patients feel understood and respected, leading to better therapeutic outcomes and patient satisfaction.
The Challenge of AI Bias
Many existing digital health solutions, including AI chatbots and virtual assistants, are intended to improve patient-provider relationships. However, these tools often fall short due to inherent bias. The dominant use of male-dominated, hetero-white language in training AI models has resulted in technologies that can be racist, sexist, and genderist when interacting with patients.
mpathic’s Solution: AI for Cultural Understanding
mpathic is pioneering a first-of-its-kind conversational analytics platform that leverages natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI to address cultural attunement in real-time. Their system identifies and corrects potential biases in provider-patient interactions, promoting more culturally sensitive care.
Building a Diverse Dataset with Wave
mpathic is partnering with Wave, a company dedicated to providing personalized virtual mental health services. Wave utilizes a team with a strong focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, ensuring a rich and representative dataset for training their AI model.
This SBIR Phase I project involves a team of leading experts from mpathic, including psychologists Alison Cerezo, Ph.D., Grin Lord, Psy.D., Amber Jolley-Paige, Ph.D., Jay Palat, M.S., and Tad Hirsch, Ph.D. Collaborating with Sarah Adler, Ph.D., and Alison Pickover, Ph.D., from Wave, this team is poised to create a groundbreaking solution that promotes equity and understanding in mental healthcare.
“For too long, mental health care has not adequately considered the cultural context of patients,” shared Dr. Grin Lord, CEO and founder of mpathic. “With AI assistance that brings the best expertise in cultural attunement to any provider, we can create more meaningful and effective interventions that respect cultural nuances.”
