Winner: Vitalk

The Health Workforce Resilience Prize awarded winners from low- or middle-income countries that have designed or developed a tool, method, or approach to improve or enhance health worker resilience.

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About the Winner

Vitalk (formerly known as TNH Health) is a Brazil-based social impact venture that applies innovative new technologies to traditional therapy and health coaching to lower the cost of mental health. Vitalk’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, text-based, virtual health assistants currently monitor and triage more than 150,000 low-income patients and the company works with health systems and hospitals, insurance companies, pharma, researchers, and other health organizations both in Brazil and in the U.S.

Represented by:

Michael Kapps, Founder & CEO, Vitalk

Michael is the CEO and founder of Vitalk. Michael was selected as a “top 30 under 30 innovator” by the MIT Technology Review (LATAM) and a finalist of the Schwab Foundation / Folha de São Paulo “Social Entrepreneur of the Future” award. Before founding TNH Health, Michael worked at McKinsey & Company. He graduated with a BA in Economics from Harvard College in 2012. Michael is a Canadian citizen, but he was born in Russia and has been living in Brazil for 6 years.

Dr. Kate Daley, Clinical Psychologist

Kate is a clinical psychologist, specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy and adult mental health. She has worked in private practice and has 14 years of experience in public health system research, therapy, and management. She holds a postgraduate diploma in cognitive behavioral therapy and has written several papers and book chapters on the subject. Having become increasingly interested in systems change she completed an MSc in organizational psychology and a postgraduate certification in leadership in healthcare as part of the prestigious Darzi Fellowship. For her fellowship, Kate was based within a Health Innovation Network where her work involved implementing evidence based, digital technologies in a range of settings. At Vitalk, she is responsible for clinical content creation and the company’s research efforts.

(From left to right) Dr. Kate Daley, Laís Melo, and Dr. Inês Hungerbühler make up the clinical team in charge of developing content and protocols for the mental health app, Vitalk.

Approach

Problem

Given the nature of their work, health workers may experience anxiety, stress, discouragement, or other emotions which can challenge their efficacy in providing quality care. Understanding how, where, when, from whom to find help to navigate these feelings may be difficult.

Solution

Vitalk has developed a mental health chatbot app. By providing assistance through a mobile phone, the app delivers psycho-education, mood monitoring, and brief evidence-based interventions in an engaging conversational format to improve mental health and resilience in health workers. It uses validated outcome measures to identify mental health risks and signal where professional support might be needed. In parallel, the chatbot can send text messages to help healthcare organizations engage and monitor populations on a large scale.