Transcript:

My name is Ryan and I am the father of the most amazing children you have never met.

Those of you who have children in your lives understand the joy they add to life. But endless sunshine and rainbows are not guaranteed, because with joy can come sorrow. These same children can become sick. Or worse. Several years ago this potential reality became my young family's new norm and we witnessed how a life-altering illness creates fear, anxiety, and loneliness in a child's life.

Unfortunately my experience is not an isolated case; each year in the US more than 1.7 million children receive inpatient medical treatment, yet fewer than a third receive any supportive behavioral health care. That leaves over a million children alone with their thoughts. And us adults in the dark about how they're truly coping; all we see is increasingly difficult and defiant behavior, and even a lack of willingness to comply, or adhere, to the very treatments designed to improve their lives.

This is painful for both the child and their family, and research repeatedly shows that unaddressed emotional trauma has a lasting negative impact on a child’s behavioral health, medical outcomes, and quality of life. But pediatric behavioral health needs have outpaced resources and the reality is that trained therapists are a finite asset in a system struggling to scale personalized care. 

Health systems are expected to improve patient experience, patient care, and access to care – while reducing costs – yet they operate on razor thin margins. It's simply impossible to find the spare billions of dollars under the couch cushions to pay 250,000 trained clinicians who don't exist. Even if we had the money to hire, or ability to inspire, that many passionate people to begin several years of training, could – should – your child suffer that long? Behavioral health does not magically improve on its own and our children need help today.

These are some of the reasons why I founded Bonifier, where we are combining human-centered design and evidence-based strategies with technology to complete our mission of empowering children to proactively protect their behavioral health.

In a world where being sick is scary, we're building Pip – a vigilant sidekick who empowers children to proactively protect their behavioral health before their fear becomes costly. Pip is a carefully scripted bot who establishes rapport through conversation to empower children to process their emotions and build coping skills and resilience using evidence-based strategies.

Now before you roll your eyes and say "another CBT chatbot," I know numerous chatbots and tele-therapy platforms exist to improve mental and behavioral health. But Pip is unique due to fundamentally different user demographics, intervention methods, and value propositions.

Pip is designed to create maximum impact by serving 6-13 year-old children – the same kids underserved by meaningful technology – and where we believe proactive and preventative intervention is most impactful.

Rather than simply distract from the uncomfortable reality of being a sick kid, or rely on incentivized activities or games, Pip builds rapport with each child by utilizing carefully scripted dialogue to journey through informational and emotional conversation into the relational stage. This relationship allows Pip to correct parents' perceptions on how their child is actually coping, and provides care teams a holistic view of the child, as well as the unique ability to efficiently monitor behavioral health, and insights to improve patient care and experience. Pip helps systems cost-effectively expand behavioral health care into populations and communities currently ignored.

Pip currently exists as a limited 31-day prototype that I built to test our assumptions that children will prefer a sincere relationship, albeit synthetic, over products that incentivize and gamify interaction in an attempt to emulate stickiness. Despite stacking the deck against ourselves by providing Pip to families of healthy children who still have complete access to their usual life – friends, devices, and games – currently more than 40% of those children, ages 4-13, choose to return daily to converse with Pip for the duration of the 31-day trial period. These same children even continue to attempt to talk with Pip for an average of 22 days beyond the end of trial access!

We're working diligently to build relationships with support groups, as well as pediatric healthcare providers and payors as we expand Pip into a valuable resource that grows with a child from diagnosis into adulthood. Our prototype is just a start and we work daily to improve Pip with regular iterations based on user feedback. 

Because our children and our health system need our help. Today.

“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say ‘It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond.”
― Fred Rogers