Southern New Mexico's Doña Ana County is the site of an Oklahoma-based mental health startup's first public sector contract, which the company's chief revenue officer said could lead to future growth in the state as it starts work with an artificial intelligence-focused partner.
Remble, founded in 2021 and based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has an on-demand digital mental health support platform. That platform is run through a mobile app, which lets users access resources like therapist-created courses, daily guides and an anonymous artificial intelligence (AI) chat space called Mia.
Bryan Wempen, Remble's chief revenue officer who lives in Santa Fe and joined the startup in July, said Remble started in what he called the "consumer space" — selling the app to individual customers. While Wempen said the startup got a lot of good feedback from consumers, it found the consumer mental health space "incredibly crowded."
So, Remble pivoted around the time Wempen joined to work directly through behavioral health care providers and public sector organizations.
The startup signed its first contract with one such public sector organization — Doña Ana County — late last month. Around 100 employees within the County's Health and Human Services Department will have access to Remble's app through the two-year contract, Wempen told New Mexico Inno.
"After that, we're basically going to try to expand," Wempen said.
That expansion could include expanding access to Remble's app to all employees of the County, and then expanding out to the general population in Doña Ana County, as well, he added. It's a moderate-sized contract, Wempen said, that could grow to a larger size.
Wempen, who said he's previously worked for the New Mexico Department of Health, added that New Mexico, along with other states, could be the spot for future contract work, as well. He mentioned Presbyterian Healthcare Services as an example of one future client in the state.
"We've just got ongoing conversations of where it might fit in to help either their clients, or we also have a set of clinical tools that their clinicians and case managers and payer support specialists can also use," he said.
Remble, which has six full-time employees and close to 40 contractors, expects to have contracts with behavioral health agencies in Oklahoma, Illinois and Texas by the end of 2024, Wempen said.
To help continue expanding its work, the startup also recently announced a partnership with Raise, a Kansas City-based health care innovation company. Raise has an AI platform called DASH.AI, which uses a machine-learning algorithm to analyze thousands of mental health conversations.
That analysis, then, can help identify the level of risk and concern of an individual's mental health situation. Remble, through the partnership, will provide over 2,000 anonymized conversations from its app to be analyzed by the DASH.AI platform.
"From there we'll be able to establish what the risk model looks like, and from there then we'll put it into live action where it'll be evaluating in real-time the conversations and the chat that are happening," Wempen said.
Using AI to analyze conversations in real time can allow professional interventions through Remble's app. The end goal of using Raise's platform, Wempen said, is to "disrupt the trajectory toward crisis" for the startup's users.
Thanks to partnering with Raise and integrating AI into its platform, Wempen said Raise could soon be at the "forefront" of client engagement in regards to mental health support.
