How This Company’s AI Tools Help Prevent Suicide And Mental Health Crises

Suicide rates are on the rise. Nearly 50,000 people died by suicide in 2022, a 3% increase from the previous year according to the CDC, and a 36% increase since 2000. Not only is suicide traumatic; it’s expensive. During 2015-2020, suicides and self-harm cost an average of $510 billion a year.

Yet, the health system is ill-equipped for suicide prevention. Clinicians and healthcare providers are hamstrung by a lack of technology for managing suicide risk. Typically, if someone needs help for a mental or emotional disorder, they are given an assessment at a clinician’s office to gauge their risk for suicide. One of these is the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), which measures the severity of someone’s depression and ends by asking them how often they have thoughts about self-harm or suicide. If the patient doesn’t come back, providers don’t have a window into understanding how the patient is doing, or determining who is at high risk and needs follow-up care. It’s easy for patients to fall through the cracks.

Christopher Molaro wants to use AI to change this. In 2017, he founded NeuroFlow, a technology platform that behavioral healthcare providers can use to keep track of their patients and assess their suicide risk. Molaro, who served in Iraq, decided to focus on suicide prevention after one of his fellow soldiers died of suicide.

“It felt like a leadership failure—we made it through 12 months of combat, then someone dies at home,” he said.

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