Meet the Innovator: Shrenik Jain of Beacon
Beacon is part of Social Innovation Lab’s 2016–17 Cohort. To learn more about SIL and the cohort, click here.
SIL: Tell us about Beacon in just a few sentences.
Shrenik: Beacon aims to make psychotherapy and peer support scalable. We’ve built a mobile application for anonymous text- and voice-based group therapy that’s integrated with artificial intelligence tools to make providers more efficient. We will deploy our app as an enterprise platform that not only increases patient access to care, but also increases the capacity of today’s overstretched mental health care providers.
SIL: Why did you decide to start this? Where did the idea come from?
Shrenik: I’ve been responding to 911 calls as part of either a rescue squad or a fire department since I was in high school. This was a firsthand exposure to how poorly managed mental health conditions are — not only amongst our patients, but also within first responders. I saw close friends and mentors suffer in silence from alcoholism and PTSD, with social stigma against mental health conditions so pervasive these responders abstained from even using free mental health resources our department had put in place to treat these exact conditions. I met my cofounder, Ravi, working at a separate healthcare startup, and after realizing he had a similar story, we began working together on Beacon.
SIL: What would you consider success for your venture and how would the world be different if it is successful?
Shrenik: Our goal is to change how therapy is delivered. The traditional 1–1 face-to-face model of therapy leaves so many people without help: ¼ of the American population has a mental health condition, and 2/3 of them receive zero treatment whatsoever. By incorporating artificial intelligence, peer support, anonymity, and the accessibility of a mobile app, we remove many current barriers to care concerning retention, stigma, time, and cost.
Our larger goal, is to make therapy itself better. So many of the studies done today have a very low power (statistically speaking), and only focus on very limited subjects. Our application of artificial intelligence technology will take a quantitative approach to behavioral health that has never been seen in history. Aggregating this data from different populations and cross-referencing different interventions will lead to insights that will allow effective mental health care to exist for everyone.
SIL: What have you accomplished so far?
Shrenik: We’ve won awards and grants from institutions as diverse as Harvard, the American Psychiatry Association, and the National Institutes of Health, which praise (and more importantly, fund), our approach to expanding access to mental health care. These early funds have been used to build a prototype that several major police and fire departments have agreed to adopt. We also just launched our first pilots at multiple different sites, including the student body at Johns Hopkins University.
SIL: Tell us about yourself? What got you interested in this issue? Any work experience or past professional/life experience that informs your work now?
Shrenik: My experiences as an EMT, which I mentioned earlier, made me focus in on mental/behavioral health, but the high-impact nature of healthcare has always fascinated me. When I first came to Hopkins, I researched hospital pricing models at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, which familiarized me with the actions of large and small healthcare systems in response to government regulations. Follow that, I worked on the business development side at Vigilant Medical, a healthcare software startup, that was a much more “down in the trenches” experience of attempting to sell to the same healthcare systems I previously studied from a distance. Both experiences were invaluable in giving me the knowledge to make sound decisions for Beacon.
SIL: What’s your favorite place or thing to do in Baltimore?
Shrenik: The aquarium and surrounding historic ships. The research focus of the National Aquarium means you learn something every time you go. The animals themselves are beyond fascinating up-close, and a powerful reminder of the staggering diversity of life on Earth. The history ships are a cool portal into Baltimore’s nautical history — the Submarine USS Torsk is my favorite. It’s hard to fathom almost 12,000 dives from when its keel was laid down in 1944, even as you walk on it.
SIL: What advice do you have for would-be social entrepreneurs thinking about starting a venture?
Shrenik: If you have an idea: think about sustainability from the start. There are all sorts of differing opinions on how to maximize impact, but the bottom line is taking someone’s money makes you beholden to them, and its highly likely your funders’ visions will diverge from yours given enough time.
If you’re still trying to come up with an idea: spend time with current social entrepreneurs and make a conscious effort to always be learning something new. The world has no shortage of problems that need solving, so if you put yourself in the right mindset, ideas will come organically.
