connectwell: Our experience at #HackMentalHealth Hackathon
Team connectwell had an incredible time at HackMentalHealth this past weekend developing our app to improve college and university students’ mental health. Our team — made up of MBA (Betty), undergraduate (Emma), and MPH (Akshar, Tanya, and Yuwen) students — formed a little over a month ago through a Yale School of Management class on social entrepreneurship. During our early discussions, we realized we had a common goal: help students connect to their potential on college and university campuses by promoting mental health and well-being.
We came to HackMentalHealth with a desire to learn from other hackers and from professionals in diverse fields, and gained even more knowledge and inspiration than we had hoped for. HackMentalHealth provided us with an invaluable opportunity to speak with psychiatrists, data scientists, app developers, business specialists, and product managers. We are so grateful for all the advice and mentorship we received this weekend that has shaped our goals and direction. By the end of the weekend, we had refined our vision, worked on a business model, and created wireframes of our application, which we named connectwell.
What is connectwell?
Connectwell is an app that matches and triages college and university students to clinical care, wellness, and performance-based art resources to sustainably improve their mental health. Connectwell uses a consultative approach, by which students complete a needs-based assessment, get matched to the resources that best fit their individualized needs, engage in those matched experiences with friends, and provide feedback on their overall experience.
Why are we building it?
Nearly 8 million college and university students in the United States experience mental health issues that prevent them from reaching their full potential at school which could lead to numerous downstream social, economic, and personal consequences.
Though colleges and universities have expanded mental health and wellness resources to address the growing mental health crisis, these resources are often disjointed. Fragmentation leads to both lack of accessibility and lack of awareness of the existence and efficacy of alternatives to clinical care among students. Unsure of the resources that will best fit their needs, students underutilize wellness and performance-based arts resources and turn to clinical care, increasing demand on over-burdened university health systems.
Connectwell helps students discover the resources that best fit their needs by centralizing information and matching students to interdisciplinary resources in an intuitive and easy way, improving both awareness and accessibility. With connectwell, students who could benefit from other modes of care will be triaged away from clinical care and connected with the services that are right for them. Connectwell will help students to thrive on campus, maximize their potential, and feel a sense of empowerment and belonging in their communities.
Who is it for?
Connectwell is for all college and university students across the US. Though we are piloting the app at Yale, we plan to rapidly scale the app to other campuses after our pilot project is completed.
How does it work?
After signing up for connectwell, students take a quick and easy needs-based assessment that enables connectwell to match them with the clinical care, wellness, and performance-based arts resources that fit their personal goals, interests, and mental health needs.
Once they receive a curated list of resources and events, students are able to engage with individual resources and utilize a variety of features that make personal planning easy and help events fit seamlessly into their lives.
Students can sync connectwell with their calendars to find events that fit well with their existing schedule. They can use GPS to see how far away they are from resources and how long it will take to get to an event. Students can sign up for events and contact directors of resources directly through the app, and can even track their own milestones and activity.
Students can also choose to make their activity public or private. Through the ability to view friend activity and share events with friends, we hope to decrease stigma and increase acceptability. Lastly, students will also be able to provide feedback on the resources they utilize.
Connectwell will always have a separate page for university mental health services that students can access at any time. Students can fill out a digital intake assessment or conduct one over video. We hope that this will reduce the administrative burden on mental health services and streamline the intake process so that students can see specialists faster.
We are thrilled to have participated in the HMH Hackathon. The opportunity to connect with clinical, business, and technical experts to further develop our application was very exciting, and we are looking forward to piloting our application on Yale’s campus.
Team
Emma Goodman — Senior @ Yale College
Akshar Patel — MPH Candidate @ Yale School of Public Health
Yuwen Qiu — MPH Candidate @ Yale School of Public Health
Betty Tang — MBA Candidate @ Yale School of Management
Tanya Yajnik, MD — MPH Candidate @ Yale School of Public Health
