Finding effective mental health care can be a challenge which is why two Northeastern graduates teamed up for a partnership between their healthcare startups.
Nita Akoh wanted to use biometrics to improve mental health care. Jay Nakhai wanted a counseling practice that helped empower both patients and clinicians.
The two Northeastern graduates, who earned their degrees more than 10 years apart, each started their own company to pursue these missions. Then a chance connection prompted a realization: they could partner together to further achieve their goals.
As of late May, AEON Counseling, founded by Nakhai, launched a partnership with MyAtlas, which was founded by Akoh, with clinicians with AEON using real-time biometric data from MyAtlas patients in order to provide more personalized and effective counseling.
“We are starting this campaign for May Mental Health Awareness Month, where we are going to pay for one years’ worth of mental health treatments for 100 college students,” said Akoh, who graduated Northeastern in 2023. “We really want to focus on solving the ailments of the young Gen Z population with care that’s innovative, that understands them and is willing to actually meet them where they’re at.”
Through the partnership, patients using MyAtlas — a platform that collects patients’ data like sleep patterns — can share their behavioral health data with AEON clinicians in order to help the latter identify high-risk patients and improve care by offering suggestions that are realistic given the patient’s lifestyle.
Akoh came up with the idea for MyAtlas while studying behavioral neuroscience at Northeastern. As a student, she worked at a psychiatric hospital where she was tasked with collecting vitals from patients, doing rounds taking their pulse, temperature and heart rate.
“I was wondering, are we doing anything with this data? Why am I doing this?” she said.
But later, when working on research that used fMRI data to try to reduce auditory hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia, Akoh saw the value in biometrics informing health care. This inspired MyAtlas, which she worked on full time shortly after graduating.
The platform collects data from users’ digital devices like their phone or Fitbit and uses that to offer insight to users on how to manage their mental health struggle. Rather than shying away from it, MyAtlas uses artificial intelligence. Its model is trained with cultural and contextual awareness, so the platform can offer personalized insights based on a person’s gender, race and other factors.
“We’re using their data to give patients mental health recommendations and interventions,” Akoh said. “We can tell that somebody is stressed, and we give them a stress intervention. We can tell that you’re not sleeping well, and we give you a recommendation for that. A cool thing that differentiates us is we’re not just giving any recommendations. We focus on giving culturally aware self-help recommendations. So if you’re a Black person who is using the application and you’re having high stress, we’re specifically sending you interventions that are proven to work for Black people who have the attributes that you have.”
Users can also get rewards for hitting their mental health goals. If a user is in need of more serious help, the app can refer them to people at partnering clinics, including AEON.
Nakhai founded AEON a few years after graduating Northeastern in 2010 with a bachelor of science in psychology. A licensed therapist and social worker, Nakhai was doing a lot of de-escalation training for other clinicians as well as teachers and police officers. She decided to start her own business focused on this, but over the pandemic, AEON shifted to offering counseling.
“We started working at the microlevel with individuals, couples and families,” Nakhai said. “It’s gotten bigger and bigger, and through some networking, the MyAtlas folks seemed to have found us, and it was a perfect marriage at the moment, because they were a platform that has lots of big ambitions, and basically my company serves exactly that product to the community.”
Akoh and Nikhai met through a mutual connection and were shocked to find how much they shared, including professors from their time at Northeastern.
“There’s something that Northeastern students just share in common, and the way we approach situations and innovation,” Akoh said. “It just made so much sense that we have studied the same thing. We have been taught by the same people, just at different times.”
From there, the collaboration was born. AEON providers can use the platform to learn more about patients and tell when they’re at risk.
“The decision to engage in therapy is a deeply moving one, and it takes a while to make these choices,” Nikhai said. “You want to feel safe where you’re going. We are trying to assist this app in being able to sustain any requests for additional or higher levels of care. We also have the connections. I think it just made sense for our businesses to join and collaborate as we complement each other.”