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Ally Health
Ally exists to drive systemic change in mental health.
Australia's process for delivering therapy has great “system factors” but ultimately doesn't work because it’s missing the “human factors” required to effect change at scale.
Ally is a digital support tool that takes what’s hard about therapy and makes it easy.
The problem.
Australia is experiencing a mental ill-health epidemic. The stats are scary, but we have the answer. Therapy. Therapy is proven to work.
So why isn't the situation getting better?
It's not that people aren’t trying therapy, 2 million Australians attend therapy each year. It's that less than 10% stick with it long enough for it to work.
The reason for this is baked into the design of the system itself. We treat therapy like medicine and prescribe it, ignoring the human factors that make therapy work.
The solution.
We prototyped and tested with 100 people around Australia in various stages of their mental health “help seeking journey”.
They told us that they knew therapy was the answer but it was just “too confusing”, “too expensive”, “too intimidating”.
Helping people stay engaged and stick with something that is good for them (but hard), isn’t a new problem.
It’s a problem that has already been tackled in Fitness, with solutions like myfitnesspal, garmin trackers, strava etc.
So that’s what we launched, a digital support tool that helps people get started with therapy and get the most out of therapy.
The impact.
Ally believes based on the research that If we can increase the amount of sessions the average Australian attends, and the engagement they have with their therapy between sessions, we will save billions of dollars and more importantly many lives, relationships and childhoods.
This year, Ally users have an average of 3.0 sessions each (April YTD). They also have an average of 9min and 18 seconds engaging with their care each month outside of sessions.
As we continue to scale the audience Australia's mental health system will become less busy, our hospitals less full. Our community will be stronger.
“This helps you to own your session rather then just expecting your therapist to guide you, the structure encourages me to engage in therapy more and it means I can go into a session clear on what I want to achieve”— Ally User