Mainul Mondal: Founder and CEO of Ellipsis Health (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis chief Medical Officer Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government and they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well.

I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Shivani and today on Razor Line, I'm happy to be joined by my mole, who is the founder and CEO of Ellipsis Health, a very cool medical technology company that's developed a method for analyzing from just a few minutes of patients speech, whether they have depression or anxiety or at least to inform the diagnosis and we'll learn a lot more from him uh in a, in just a second before we get into that, we would love to hear a bit more about your background and how you went for management consulting to then founding Ellipsis Health.

For me, it was um problem solving and I think it became pretty clear to me as an individual that I wanted to sort of work on solving heart problems uh with other people in college.

I studied um economics. Uh I studied theater design but I was lost in college.

I, you know, I had a lot of thoughts. Um, and I think that my, my first couple of jobs out of college was in management consulting.

Um It's a great training ground. I think it teaches you a framework which you can um chunk up problems and bite sizes, right?

Put, put a framework around it and advise uh people uh or CEO CFO S and uh leadership team what to do next? II think that's where it just got disconnected for me because I think I would sort of go from the what to do next to actually doing it.

So for me, that is how I would sort of bridge the gap. Uh But I think I want to sort of venture to the world, which was identifying a problem.

Uh That was a mental health and wellness for me based on, you know, what I've seen through personal experiences in my family members to what I was seeing outside and globally and say, you know what that's a problem worth solving because it touches humanity.

Yes, it's one of those I think few problems one can solve or try to solve to actually actually have an impact, you know, with the mission of ellipsis health is to create a so called behavioral health vital sign.

So can you tell us a bit more about what you mean by that and also just the scope of the problem. Um you know, I know all of us know that depression and anxiety, particularly in the COVID era are, are problems.

Yeah, if you think about this, I mean, you know, one third of the world's population um have symptoms of depression and anxiety.

We think about this as a measurement problem and equity problem, right? Uh It's an equity problem because I think it's a, it's a fundamental right of human beings to be able to access um uh wellness and health care.

And I think that what we've seen, especially in mental health and wellness over the last few decades, um only people have resources have access to it and we felt that it's our duty to, to make sure we come up with a new clinical standard that actually can measure depression and anxiety objectively in a scalable engaging way, right?

So that it can quantify and you can measure it uh and manage it because if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Can we measure to help people manage and can we lower the bar where people who don't have the resources can actually can find out where they are.

If you think about Silicon Valley or other parts of the US to, you know, parts of, for example, Africa, let's think about Kenya.

We want to create something that can be back full no matter where you live and for us that was the problem we want to solve.

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