About Us
We believe that everyone deserves to be mentally fit and healthy, and should get the right type and level of care when and how they need it.
We're on a mission to enable people to look after their own mental health and fitness, and get the right professional support whenever they need it.
The Problem
As our world and lives keep getting more complicated, our mental health and fitness is declining.
In Australia alone almost four million Australians experience mental health issues of some kind each year – that’s one in five of us. Globally the numbers aren't much better.
What’s worse is that only half of this number (in Australia) receive the appropriate help, and it’s not uncommon to have to wait weeks or even months to see a mental health professional.
This has a number of effects, including
- Potentially significant and unnecessary suffering by those affected directly and indirectly
- Overload of the health system and mental health care practitioners
- Organisational and societal economic loss
Our Solution
We've created a digital platform that enables
- Individuals to access the right tools, information and care at the right time
- Professional carers and Health Service Providers to deliver prioritised, efficient and effective care
- Organisations to predict, support and respond to the mental health and fitness needs of their employees and / or members
Origin Story
The ideas which underpin our platform came out of some research done through the Young & Well CRC, which was set up to explore the role of technology in Youth and Adolescent Mental Health. Running between 2011 and 2016, the research produced an early blueprint for the Synergy Online System - a digital tool that could be used to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people.
In 2017 the Australian Commonwealth Government funded Project Synergy, a $30 million grant to broaden the research to understand how digital technologies could be used to improve mental health outcomes across the wider population. Synergy uniquely brought together academic researchers, clinical mental health professionals, digital technologists and those with lived experience of mental ill-health to explore the challenges faced in delivering relevant and timely care, as well as what possible solutions could be developed to solve them.
To deliver Project Synergy and produce a next generation digital mental health platform, PwC Australia and University of Sydney teamed up with Professors Ian Hickie and Jane Burns to form InnoWell.
The result - an innovative world-class digital mental health platform validated during the research by over 2,000 users across 13 locations.
