Ben Lewis, CEO of digital therapeutics platform Limbix, joins Cheddar News to discuss the app helping teens in early stages of depression.

Between Bells

How Digital Therapeutic Platform 'Limbix' Helps Teens Manage Depression

Welcome back to between Bell's suicide is the second leading cause of death among people ages 10-24. And it has been increasing every year since 2007 startling statistics as suicide was the second leading cause of death among people ages 10-34. That was in 2018 according to the CDC. However, aiming to help alleviate adolescent depression is digital therapeutic platform. Olympics joining us now to discuss is Ben Lewis Ceo of olympics. Ben welcome to the show. The need for mental health platforms like yours is so important now than ever. What inspired you to create this company? Well, thank you, it's great to meet you. The true inspiration behind our product spark Rx and the olympics platform really came from visiting with community mental health centers and these are you know, centers that are largely responsible for treating the Medicaid population mental health needs and talking to the doctors there and understanding how few of the patients that need help are able to access it through traditional psychotherapy made us realize that a digital solution was likely going to play a key role in helping to alleviate this problem. How does your platform work differently than the competitors that are out there in the market right now. Ben, So one of the key differences between a product like spark Rx and other software geared towards helping with mental health issues is that our product is really clinically effective software backed by rigorous clinical trials to prove that we are both safe and effective. Spar correct is part of a category of prescription digital therapeutics where we run these clinical trials usually with a control arm that gets uh it's called a sham app or a placebo app. And then we take that data to the FDA so we can be cleared as a prescription digital therapeutic which lets doctors prescribed this app to their patients where it's been ideally paid for by insurance. A lot of the software on the market today. Uh it doesn't have to go through those clinical trials. They aren't going through the FDA and are really more self service wellness products. Uh not necessarily designed for a clinically diagnosed population. I'm glad you mentioned that because spark Our X. Is available under the FDA. It's policy to treat psychiatric disorders during Covid 19. How is Spark X. Designed to help adolescent depression? So that's a really important question. You know, our product is built on a clinically effective protocol that is used with traditional psychotherapy that we digitized as part of our product. And it's really geared specifically towards adolescents. The key ingredient behind spark Rx is something called behavioral activation, which involves having teenagers understand which activities help them feel better, which activities are making them feel worse and then getting them to schedule and do those activities which help them improve their mood. And so all of the examples and the psycho educational products. All that is geared towards teams. We have a teenage advisory council which is important for us because every single piece of user interaction in our software, every piece of content goes through rigorous user testing with these teenagers to make sure that the product is easy to use, understand and perfectly geared for that audience. We don't have an adult advisory council and other software which runs the gamut has to make sure their products work really well for, you know, a freshman in college as well as the 65 year old grandparents. Our product is targeting that much tighter age range and therefore everything in that product. If you're towards that population, we know access to proper healthcare has been a huge problem in our country. The pandemic certainly made it even more obvious. What is the price point when it comes to your platform bed? So that's an important question today. Spar correct is available at no cost to teenagers. Is part of the Covid 19 response. So this is right now currently live because the FDA discretionary enforcement authorization due to covid 19 when our product is cleared, the price point will be determined at that point. Um based on the insurance, do you feel after the pandemic? Or when we reached the end of the pandemic, which were close to. Hopefully, we'll see. We'll see if suicides going down in our country. Obviously that's the hope is that suicides will will start to fall. Um Ultimately the pandemic has exacerbated the mental health issues that teenagers are facing. But we were seeing the problem rise prior to Covid and I don't necessarily expect it to fall dramatically when the pandemic subsides. Obviously the social isolation has been a significant factor for teenagers, but there are a lot of other problems facing teenagers. And one of the biggest problems is the difficulty in accessing care for those who need it. You know, there's hundreds of counties without access to a child psychologist, thousands without a child psychiatrist. And so if you do need help, if you've been diagnosed with depression, anxiety or other mental health disorder, finding resources to get adequate clear, it can be very difficult. And that problem is even more so in those without significant financial resources. So if you're in the Medicaid population, finding a therapist without a six month wait list can be an almost impossible task for many americans. What role do you think the pandemic has played when it comes to mental health of young people of young adults? So I think it's certainly been a negative factor for the mental health of young adults, but one of the positives certainly has been the extra attention that this topic has been receiving. You know, recently, there was a surgeon general's letter specifically focused on teenage mental health and what we need to do as a country to address this problem. And if you watch the State of the Union address last week, president biden also mentioned specifically teenage mental health. And so, you know, these federal resources will be coming to play. I hope that can of course, increase the resources available to the young americans that need it. Ben Lewis ceo of olympics. Thank you for everything you and your team are doing. Ben. We appreciate your time.