Member Article

Paranimo & Amdaris develop mental health platform to support charity sector at scale

• The platform, developed in conjunction with software developer Amdaris, has helped 93% of therapy users find a therapist who match their needs, putting power in people’s hands
• Paranimo’s partnership with Amdaris secures Innovate UK funding and COVID-19 Business Response grant to help scale the platform to UK charities

Mental health technology company Paranimo is expanding its platform offering to the charity sector following its successful launch to the general public. Developed with the support of Bristol-based Amdaris, the move will see Paranimo empower charities to offer tailored mental health support, however, whenever and wherever users choose.

To date, Paranimo has worked with Amdaris to develop its mental health delivery platform, enabling users to match with a personal therapist and access the right mental health support online via their “virtual therapy room” during COVID-19 and beyond.

Paranimo’s platform can understand an individual’s unique mental health challenges and needs. So far, the technology has resulted in 93% of therapy users finding a therapist who matched their needs, with an average reduction of 58% anxiety, 51% irritability, and 40% depression after therapy. Paranimo (which translates from Latin to ‘match mind’), created the service with Amdaris using highly advanced search and comparison tools (and video) to help patients find the most appropriate therapist for their needs.

Upon the success of the platform to date, Paranimo is launching its B2B offering to support charities and other small organisations to make a positive difference to mental health at scale. Where charities are typically time poor, are not technology focused, and need to prove the measurable impact of their services, the availability of Paranimo’s mental health delivery platform will aid such organisations with customer registration, schedule management, payment processing, and video and telephone therapy. This is in addition to easing the challenges associated with finding the right therapist for vulnerable individuals.

Existing charity adopters of the Paranimo platform include Care Support Wiltshire and Carers Together, who use Paranimo to support the operational delivery of mental health services. In the next 12 months, Paranimo aims to support nearly 2,500 UK charities with their mental health provision, scaling the availability of their mental health provision. Due to the success of the partnership to date, Amdaris will also be continuing to help Paranimo scale, assisting with the ongoing development of the platform.

Paranimo selected Amdaris based on similar socially responsible values, as well as Amdaris’ reputation for delivering at pace. As part of the project, Amdaris worked with Paranimo to take the minimal viable product (MVP) to a platform ready for commercialisation.

As part of the technology’s development, Paranimo secured funding from Innovate UK, which invested over £150,000 across two grants, including a £50,000 COVID grant. Bristol-based Amdaris, which featured on Paranimo’s winning Innovate UK COVID grant, provided the software development.

“Seeking the right mental health is complicated and really inaccessible, leading to a lot of people feeling disempowered. Our platform reduces the time and complexity when seeking that support, whilst increasing accessibility for people through our B2B funded model. We give charities and other organisations the chance to better support the people they care about. If you want to help as many people as possible as fast as possible, you need tech. The Amdaris team helped us take the technology from minimal viable product through to the fully developed offering, and have been a huge support for achieving Paranimo’s vision,” said Matt Vamplew, co-founder at Paranimo.

“The pandemic created a greater need than ever and we were fortunate enough to work with Amdaris to accelerate our vision of an online model which has completely disrupted private mental health care, putting the power in the patients’ hands,” he added.

Andy Rogers, Co-CEO at Amdaris, commented: “When we were first introduced to Paranimo, we were excited to join the mission to empower people to take control of their mental health through tech. Paranimo came to us at a time when mental health issues needed more attention and using technology to empower people to seek help is something we firmly believe in and we are truly proud to be involved in this project.”

Working together with the team at Paranimo, in a highly agile manner, Amdaris were also able to provide suggestions on the look of the platform as well as contribute to the validation of features. Since its 2020 launch, Paranimo is now looking to develop real-time data insights, and further investment is being sought to enhance the platform capabilities, including the building of a market first therapist biometric system as well as introduce more machine learning and eventually AI.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Alex Maxwell .