Anima Mentis: leading mental health prevention with a data-driven approach

“We like to think of our solution as a fitness center for the soul. A gym for the mind that helps not only cure mental illnesses but also, and most importantly, to prevent them.”

Dr. Peter Kirschner, CEO at Anima Mentis, is describing his organization’s revolutionary approach to mental health and the technology that makes it possible.

“Gyms and wellness centers for the body have existed for decades, but our brain needs one too,” he continues. “And that’s what Anima Mentis is really about: helping people look after their minds and improve their wellbeing by normalizing mental health prevention.”

It’s a mission that Dr. Kirschner and Anima Mentis have been on for four years. One that combines traditional therapy with a ground-breaking, data-centric solution that analyzes how a person responds to certain events. And then uses AI to provide personalized advice that will help them deal with those same events in the future. 

“We know that our mental health depends on emotions, which influence and drive most of our decisions,” he explains. “So, we realized that if we could help our patients handle their emotions, we could also give them recommendations on how to live their lives better.

“And we’ve developed a secure, data and technology-driven way to do it.”

From start-up to treatment center in just four years

Anima Mentis was born in 2017 from a group of doctors and entrepreneurs who wanted to tackle burnouts and depression among medical staff.  

“Our main task was to find a way to reduce stress for our colleagues and patients both inside and outside the hospital,” says Dr. Kirschner, the first medical doctor to be involved in the project. “And since the beginning, we knew that we would have to do it in two ways: analogically and digitally.” 

For the founders of Anima Mentis, this meant building two things: a wellness center for in-person monitoring; and a digital platform that gathers, stores and analyzes patient data for contextual information that was created in partnership with Zühlke Austria.

Getting a 360-degree view of a patient’s mental health

Built in 2018, Anima Mentis’ center is the place where patients start their mental health journey. “All new customers come to our center for a preliminary mental fitness check that helps our clinicians come up with a treatment plan,” he says. Checks are a mixture of traditional procedures – like coaching, seminars and therapy sessions – and sensorial screenings that involve treatment rooms, virtual reality treatments and more. 

Throughout these sessions, Anima Mentis gathers data on how patients respond to different scenarios, situations and experiences. 

But the process doesn’t end there. By logging into the Anima Mentis mobile app, patients can continue to share their reactions, emotions and parameters with clinicians even when away from the center. They can also share their vitals by connecting the app to their wearables.

This combination of biometric, medical and contextual data is then stored and processed on a platform powered by the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Built in collaboration with  Zühlke Austria – the company that is supporting Anima Mentis throughout its remarkable journey  the platform uses AI to interpret the information and generate insights.

“The app is the baseline for the gathering of our patient data,” Dr. Kirschner says. “This gives us access to their vitals – such as heart rate or blood pressure – but also the context they find themselves in. 

“So for example, if one of our patients is heading into a meeting, they can notify that on the app and explain the reasons behind certain behaviors and reactions.”

As Albert Frömel, Industry Lead Health and Life Sciences at Zühlke Austria, points out, this helps provide a 360-degree view of a patients’ mental health status. “Thanks to the parameters we gather, medical experts at Anima Mentis are then able to define which situations are good for you and which you might want to avoid,” he explains.

“This paves the way for them to deliver a truly personalized care plan for patients that can be continuously updated based on contextual and biometric data.” 

A secure, privacy-preserving solution powered by Microsoft

Anima Mentis uses a range of Azure components to deliver a secure, compliant and privacy-preserving platform. 

At the heart of it is a Data Platform, powered by Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, that stores all the data in a secure way. “At Zühlke, we highly value data-safety, which is all the more important when it comes to the healthcare sector,” says Albert Frömel from Zühlke Austria.

“So we are using all the encryption features and standards that Microsoft provides through the healthcare platform to make sure that everything is protected.”

The organization also provides its clients with a unique holographic identification solution that can be accessed through a QR code – allowing to keep the data entirely anonymous. 

Once collected, the data is then visualized through dashboards built on a Microsoft Power BI platform, which doctors and experts at the organization use to identify the relevant information. “The great thing about this platform is that it uses the power of AI and cloud technology to make sense of large volumes of information, while also focusing on the details,” adds Dr. Kirschner. 

“And then being able to present the data in a way that is understandable to both our doctors and our patients is really what makes Power BI a crucial tool for us.”

Gaining support from patients and clinicians

While still in its early days, Anima Mentis’ solution is already making waves. 

After a year that has put medical workers and the general population under increased mental strain, more and more people are turning to the Austrian organization for support. 

Central to this is that, thanks to smartphones and wearables, most of the data collection happens remotely. “With patients now accessing our app from their devices, we can treat them from a distance and prevent them from coming in as often as before,” explains Dr. Kirschner. 

This is something that the healthcare industry is increasingly trying to achieve. Amid a fast-aging population, new capacity demands and the shift to remote working, leaders are emphasizing the importance of prevention instead of treatment. “That’s exactly what we want too,” he comments. “We don’t wait until someone gets ill to treat them, but rather treat them to prevent them from getting ill.”

He says that doctors, too, are getting increasingly on-board with the solution. “In my experience, there are two kinds of doctors: those who love AI and all these new technologies, and those who hate them,” he says. “The amount of people who love using them is getting larger and larger. Because it’s simply so much easier to work with it.” 

Digital solutions will play an increasingly crucial role in the years to come, he adds, helping simplify complex analyses and supporting diagnoses. “But ultimately,” he says. “The final say will always be down to real doctors.”

Embedding Anima Mentis’ solution into the daily routine

While collaborating with Salzburg’s Paracelsus Medical Private University to document the benefits of their solution, Anima Mentis is looking at the future. 

Expansion is on the cards. “On the one hand, we’re looking to build more centers, and focus on our patients even more,” explains Dr. Kirschner. “On the other, we also want to expand our service to target the workplace and private life.

“The goal is to embed our AI service into a person’s normal routine, so that whatever they do – whether it’s working, picking a film to watch or travelling – we can support them in making decisions that, based on our data, are good for their mental health and wellbeing,” he concludes.