Vitalize Care Improves the Mental Health of Healthcare Workers

By focusing on the specific mental and emotional needs of healthcare professionals, Vitalize Care creates a more equitable and positive experience for both healer and patient.

Challenge

Per the CDC, mental health issues among clinicians have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Recent surveys suggest that 60% of healthcare workers feel burnt out, making it three times more likely that critical errors will occur when treating patients. Because of this paradigm, greater than 30% of healthcare workers currently on the job plan to leave in two to three years, costing the US healthcare system over $60B annually. A good deal of that financial investment goes into replacing staff, training, and other ancillary costs.

But there is more than money being lost with the revolving door of medical professionals due to mental health concerns. A successful healthcare system relies on having the staff to provide appropriate care to patients. As turnover rates rise and experienced, trained professionals continue leaving due to burnout, there aren’t enough clinicians to address patient needs. Keep in mind, workloads haven’t lessened; the number of staff available to deal with it has. That means fewer trained professionals bearing an already overwhelming workload that includes medical emergencies, losing patients, long hours, and mental and emotional exhaustion.

Hospitals and health systems offer a variety of mental health solutions for their staff, yet utilization rates are historically low. As Vitalize Care founders Veeraj Shah and Sanketh Andhavarapu discovered, while most hospitals offer employee assistance programs, their engagement rates are less than 5% for a few key reasons: 1) They are understaffed, resulting in long wait-times and complicated onboarding processes that can take up to four weeks; 2) they are highly stigmatized as participating can jeopardize their careers; and 3) they are focused solely on one-on-one therapy and lack peer support, which is an important part of the mental health journey. Alternatively, live consultant-led workshops, seminars, or peer support coaching sessions make healthcare workers feel too vulnerable, especially when much of their anxiety and grief is rooted in self-blame.

On the other hand, existing digital solutions such as mindfulness apps don’t address the unique experiences clinicians face on a daily basis — loss of a patient, medical errors, traumatic emergency room experiences, etc. — causing them to feel unseen and unheard. Additionally, Veeraj and Sanketh discovered that many of the mental health services available to healthcare workers are also offered by individuals who have little experience or understanding of what clinicians face on a daily basis.

The issue is dire: beyond the dollars lost, overworked and overburdened medical professionals are experiencing life-altering mental health challenges that are proving fatal. There is a critical shortage of clinicians due to emotional distress; creating a more equitable way to address the specific and unique stressors healthcare workers face every day is key.

Vitalize Care plans to unlock that much-needed, targeted access.

Origin Story

During his freshman year at the University of Maryland, Vitalize Care co-founder Veeraj Shah discovered he and his peers had no idea how to find on-campus healthcare information. Growing up with severe asthma, Veeraj was in and out of hospitals and doctors’ offices throughout his childhood, so he had firsthand knowledge of how important it is to have easy access to care. At school he quickly identified a gap in this kind of health information access, so he created Chat Health, a chatbot system that provided students everything they needed to navigate the university-based healthcare system.

As Chat Health grew, Veeraj became more interested in the intersection of health and technology so he joined a startup incubator. There he met Sanketh Andhavarapu, founder of the nonprofit organization STEPS — a tutoring program geared to a student’s specific needs with teaching assistance from those who have taken the same class — which channels 95% of revenue towards grants for improving education in underserved areas. Sanketh long aspired to be a patient caregiver, spending hundreds of hours working as a volunteer and medical assistant in a variety of clinical settings during school. The two immediately found themselves standing in front of a whiteboard together, coming up with ideas on how to heal an ailing healthcare system, building upon the concept of lived-experience engagement they were already providing for their specific consumers.

During their previous clinical experiences, Veeraj and Sanketh had both witnessed how the clinicians around them were burning out. They saw how healthcare providers were emotionally exhausted, increasingly disconnected from their patients, and losing their sense of purpose. They both dived into the clinician mental health space from a variety of angles. Veeraj collaborated with the US Surgeon General on mental health initiatives for the healthcare workforce and led research in behavioral health funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Sanketh conducted research on how burnout leads to more medical errors and published the largest study on PTSD rates among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This led them to the mutual finding that mental wellness options available to clinicians in need of mental health support were not proving very effective. The first kernels of Vitalize Care were born.

Awareness of the mental health crisis facing clinicians was becoming more prevalent, and using what Veeraj and Sanketh learned through their different experiences felt like a viable solution. They started talking to as many healthcare workers as they could to better understand the disconnect between the kind of help providers needed and the mental healthcare available. From talking to over 200 healthcare workers, Veeraj and Sanketh landed on several key insights. Seeking help within a peer-group environment — openly sharing what they were feeling and facing with coworkers — was proving uncomfortable and difficult for many healthcare professionals who already carried shame from the situations that led to their mental and emotional difficulties. Engaging in programs led by mental health professionals also left clinicians wanting as the care physicians were not experienced in dealing with their specific needs, therefore making it difficult to address them properly. Similarly, digital mindfulness and mental wellness solutions — while anonymous and easily accessible — dealt with issues on a broader level, once again not getting to the crux of the problems clinicians face on a daily basis, and creating a mental wellness void in the process.

Healthcare workers were seeking accessible mental health support led by those who had been through the same experiences but without it putting them at risk, shaming them, or making them feel overlooked. With a panel of 50 clinicians, the two began co-designing a digital platform that provided specifically-targeted mental health support from different healthcare workers. Users could choose anonymity while dealing with topics and situations that resonated with them, by working with someone who knew what they were going through and had been in the trenches.

As Veeraj says, “Technology works when it meets the users where they are, and they can use it without fundamentally changing their behavior.”

The two co-founders knew they had to build a user-friendly solution to bring mental wellbeing to healthcare workers on a platform that is easily accessible, engages them in a way that makes them feel they are being heard and their unique needs are recognized, and gets them the mental health support they need when they need it. Fall of 2021 saw the Vitalize Care platform ideated and designed, and the first hospitals approached them to pilot the project. To do that, they knew they needed a strong development mind to bring it to fruition.

In February of 2022, Nikhil D’Souza joined the duo and the three co-founders started fully developing Vitalize into a functioning business. Nikhil was part of the team that created Vincere Health — a “quit smoking and get paid” digital platform that successfully completed the United Healthcare Techstars accelerator and raised a seed round — and was entrenched in researching clinical trial effectiveness at Eli Lilly and Company, among other things. Already steeped in bringing new medicines to market and providing quality healthcare to all via the digital space, Nikhil’s know-how and expertise in utilizing technology to bridge the healthcare gap provided an opportunity to better understand and address how to take Vitalize from design to a functioning website and mobile application. By the spring of 2022, the interface was built, and the first pilot hospital was onboarded.

Under the Hood

The core feature of Vitalize Care is group coaching for healthcare workers. Through the mobile app, healthcare workers connect via a live coaching session with peers who share their experiences. The coaches are clinicians who have been in the shoes of those seeking support — they are physicians and nurses who became health coaches because they were passionate about holistic care. Each has a certificate in health and wellness coaching in addition to their personal experience as healthcare workers.

Conducted like a Zoom session, coaches keep their cameras on but those seeking assistance can protect their identity by changing their username, turning off their camera, and even altering their voice. Coaching is geared specifically to the needs of the healthcare professional, and those seeking assistance can choose from sessions that resonate with what they are going through at any given time. There are several opportunities to engage throughout the day for easy access at a clinician’s convenience.

The live group coaching is complemented by other features to ensure a comprehensive and holistic mental health journey. The app offers text-based peer support, which allows healthcare workers to connect with others dealing with their same issues, again anonymously with their identity protected. Healthcare workers can also access on-demand content such as guided meditation and tools to build mindfulness and positive psychology skills to complement the live features. The holistic approach assists with grief management and to help build resilience when faced with unexpected situations and mental health challenges.

For healthcare employers, Vitalize offers data and analytics on staff mental health and app engagement to help organizational leadership better understand how to support their staff. This can reduce burnout that will lower attrition rates and keep the cost of replacing, training, and acclimating staff down while also supporting a healthy, happy workforce.

Why We’re Proud to Invest

Vitalize Care is a young company with young founders, which we see as a distinct advantage in this category. They bring a fresh perspective to what has long been a stigmatized and overlooked category: mental health for healthcare workers. In their experience developing Vitalize, Veeraj and Sanketh have discovered that there is a generational divide. Younger physicians and nurses are deeply aware that the stigma attached to the label of poor mental wellness simply means it’s necessary to discuss it openly to remove the shame and get people the help they need. This awareness is slowly having what they view as a ripple effect on how hospitals and healthcare systems react and even how funding is allocated to mental health. The traditional mindset that physicians and care workers should be able to handle anything because they have been trained to do so is not seen as viable by the younger generation coming in. The standard of self-maintenance is only attainable by a few people and it’s not realistic.

Vitalize Care recognizes this and is getting in front of it to support a space for more holistic and equitable care for those who are given the job of caring for all of us. The Vitalize team is committed to building something that clinicians can trust. They already have products in the pipeline that will engage thousands of healthcare workers through selling to hospitals and health systems, healthcare staffing and digital health companies, and state and national medical societies. They foresee a complete overhaul of the healthcare system within a decade or two because the clinicians who are young now — those leading the charge for such things as making COVID vaccines available to all — will soon be the ones making decisions in the medical industry. Vitalize intends to be there at the forefront. They have already brought on board their first paying health system and have several more in the pipeline for the upcoming months.

We’re proud to back Vitalize because they plan to not only focus on the individual drivers of burnout and mental unrest but the roots and causes of both; they will continue developing solutions for the systemic changes needed. That deep dive has the potential of creating avenues for care that will boost the wellbeing of current medical workers while also energizing and attracting the new generation of clinicians.

Join us in welcoming Veeraj Shah, Sanketh Andhavarapu, Nikhil D’Souza, and the Vitalize team to the StartUp Health family.

Learn more and connect with the Vitalize Care team.

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Vitalize Care Improves the Mental Health of Healthcare Workers was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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