Innovators Pitch Ideas to Help Doctors, Patients, Parents, and Researchers

As the Exhibit Hall started to wind down yesterday, four teams of entrepreneurs took to the stage for the last event at APA 2025’s Mental Health Innovation Zone: the Psychiatry Innovation Lab. As in previous years, each team had five minutes to sell their product, service, and/or business model to the assembled audience, then eight minutes to answer questions from a panel of judges with expertise in clinical medicine, business, and technology.

This year’s participating innovators were:

Allia Health

Allia is a precision mental health electronic health record (EHR) platform that looks to make private practice administration as seamless as possible, so physicians can spend more time on patient care. The AI-guided platform can process various types of patient data—including information from wearables—into visual progress charts and includes an embedded telehealth service, automatic note taking, billing, and scheduling apps, and an embedded telehealth service.

The product is free to clinicians—forever. The company believes that the higher-value care psychiatrists can offer with Allia will enable better contracts and billing rates, resulting in extra revenue that is split between provider and company.

Blackdog Green

Based on the internet meme “Inside You There Are Two Wolves,” this preventive wellness app helps users balance their black dog (representing frustration and self-doubt) and green dog (representing positivity and growth). The app converts classical concepts of psychological conditioning into fun, animated courses full of canine metaphors—which are relatable to people of all ages and educational levels.

Blackdog Green is envisioned as an annual subscription model, with an optional add-on to receive one-on-one counseling sessions. The app specifically states that it’s not therapy, nor trying to be, but a tool for everyday people dealing with everyday struggles.

FirstThen

Rates of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) continue to rise in youth—and medication shortages are now occurring, with only about one in three families able to access the psychosocial interventions that are also part of gold-standard care. This direct-to-consumer app delivers self-guided interventions to parents of children with ADHD, helping them develop personalized growth plans.

An unusual design twist of FirstThen is that it doesn’t use generative AI. All of the rules, directions, and responses for the interventions were generated by human clinicians.

Sama Therapeutics

Sama is an AI-powered biomarker discovery platform. Its interactive menu allows clinicians to select from dozens of clinical assessment scales, such as the Montgomery Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS). Patients then have conversations with a fully customizable avatar, and based on their words, tone, inflection, and facial expressions, Sama objectively assigns a MADRS score for that individual.By working with both practitioners and clinical investigators, the Sama team aims to build a reinforcing loop: Clinical trial participant data provides validation of Sama’s accuracy, which encourages more use in routine health care, which generates more real-world biomarker data to improve future clinical trials.

And the Winners Are…

All four teams gave impassioned pitches—not surprising, as every contestant had a familial connection with mental illness. In the end, the four-judge panel chose Sama as this year’s champion, while FirstThen was the audience favorite. Congratulates to the winners as well as all the contestants for trying to find innovative ways to improve mental health care access, quality, and precision. ■