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Startup Spotlight: Tao Connect, Inc.

Startup Spotlight: Tao Connect, Inc.

TAO Connect is a seven-week online program that helps improve treatment outcomes for patients with mental health problems. The program consists of engaging modules that patients can complete online on their computers, tablets or smartphones. Patients videoconference with their counselors each week and also receive text messages several times per week to keep them on track. The result is a new model of treatment delivery that increases the capacity to provide mental health treatment without increasing budgets or staff size.

Each patient gets a weekly progress assessment and a 10-15 minute videoconference with his or her therapist. The weekly progress assessment uses an industrystandard instrument that has been adopted by the Department of Defense and many other organizations as a consistent measure of symptom improvement. The counselor and the patient can see the progress chart during the weekly videoconference. In addition, the counselor can see that the patient has engaged with the educational modules as well as the practice exercises, journals and logs. This information keeps the patient and the counselor engaged in the treatment through accountability.

TAO Connect addresses the important factors for patient compliance between counseling sessions with a format that is engaging, entertaining and educational in order to make lasting change in symptoms. Therapists can be incredibly effective for the hour when they are face-to-face with their clients for traditional counseling, but addressing the practices that make a difference over the remaining 167 hours of each week allow the patient to make great gains in his or her own improvement. Counselors can increase their capacity by seeing up to three TAO Connect patients per hour rather than one patient per hour as in traditional therapy. The TAO Connect platform is sold as a site license to college and university counseling centers at a fraction of the cost of hiring additional counselors or finding additional office space.

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The initial market is college and university counseling centers across the United States. There are over 5,000 student counseling centers serving over 22 million students, and about 7.5 percent of students seek counseling at student counseling centers annually. Our future market (2–3 years out) includes development of the application to the general U.S. psychotherapy market, which is currently an approximately $14 billion market.

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