MORGANTOWN — Local medtech startup Moodr Health is celebrating a recent win as Startup World Cup regional champion and the opportunity to compete for the top global honor and a $1 million prize in October.
Moodr Health is a startup from Intermed Labs and Morgantown tech firm M&S Consulting and describes its platform as a digital healthcare solution dedicated to proactively addressing, treating and evaluating mental health challenges.
Mon Health’s P3 program — Progressing through Postpartum — teamed with Moodr last year to offer perinatal care for expectant and post-delivery moms dealing with mental health challenges. And last week Moodr announced a partnership with West Virginia Junior College to launch a pilot program to offer nurses in training much-needed mental health support.
The Moodr office is at Intermed Labs headquarters in the WVU Innovation Corp. office building.
Michelle Hopkins is chief customer success officer for Moodr Health, works for Intermed and is a consultant with M&S Consulting.
She explained that Moodr is not an app but a two-way texting resource connecting the mom or the nursing student to a life coach or clinician running Moodr from their site. The life coach sees a text from a client on their computer and replies.
“It’s all about wellbeing, wellness and taking care of ourselves from a holistic approach,” and letting them know they have someone there for them, she said.
Ashok Aggarwal, co-founder of Intermed and M&S Consulting, said, “One of our goals is for Moodr to live on its own and be on its own two feet and have its own identity.”
He said healthcare is fundamentally reactive — responding to a need for help. But mental health is not the same. Care has to proactive. In the perinatal field, 85% of moms suffer from some sort of mental distress during pregnancy and one year post-partum, but only 7% seek help.
“What we’re doing is creating a capability and a platform and a protocol and a team that’s going to proactively reach out to all those people that are what we call suffering in silence.” Right now, that’s 6.6 million moms. And at WVJC, it’s nursing students who experience the compound pressures of nursing education with life pressures of being adults, possibly with jobs and families.
Seeking help means surmounting not only the reluctance to reach out, but the potential stigma of being identified with mental health issues. And in the perinatal field, depression can affect dads and kids and the families, too.
Many people and companies and organizations are trying to figure out how to solve the problem. “We feel like we’ve got a pretty great approach for it, and our data is proving that it is a great approach.”
And it can be applicable to every mental health condition — including PTSD and the loneliness epidemic that became apparent during COVID.
Hopkins expanded on that. “Social determinants of health is such a hot topic right now.” There are case managers who can’t reach their patients because people don’t answer their phones anymore. That creates a communication gap. But people answer a text. Case managers call Moodr a case manager’s dream.
Aggarwal’s son, Ataes Aggarwal, is a student at Johns Hopkins University and leads strategy and vision for the tech side of Moodr, and helps with the business side. Participating remotely, he commented on the World Cup.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to get out there and show the world that Moodr is here and we’re trying to help a large portion of the population,” he said. “We’re a startup and we’re a business and we’re already impacting thousands of lives right now, and we’re looking to grow.” The award is a step in that direction.
The Startup World Cup held more than 50 regional events across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Each regional winner will compete in the final competition Oct. 4 in San Francisco.
The regional win was actually the second step that began with winning $70,000 in the IgniteWV pitch competition, said Jackie Lytton, director of marketing and business development for Moodr. She also does some marketing for M&S.
IgniteWV is hosted by the WVU John Chambers College of Business and Economics. It’s a competition open to all parties age 18 and up interested in registering a business in West Virginia to support the start and growth of their business ideas.
Through IgniteWV, Hopkins said, Moodr was one of six startups selected for consideration for the World Cup regional award and won.
Lytton commented, “I think we’re just proud to be representing West Virginia and putting our state on the map.” They want to be the gold standard of care for mental health issues. The connections they make in California in October will continue putting the state and Moodr on the map.
Ashok Aggarwal said they are in talks with other healthcare organizations and insurance payers about them partnering with Moodr, but it’s too soon to reveal details.
Intermed and M&S and others have made significant investments in Moodr, he said. “We’ve built out a very mature product at this point. The main thing that we’re doing to move forward is get the word out,” to get further recognized by thought leaders in the space.
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