Bringing together the best in class psychological treatments
Digital learning to scale up effective, quality-assured psychological interventions.
What is EMPOWER?
EMPOWER will build health system capacity for the prevention and care of mental health problems, across the life course, globally. We will achieve our goal by deploying digital training, supervision and quality assurance tools to rapidly train and support frontline health workers to learn, master and deliver evidence-based psychosocial interventions, and to use the emerging data to evaluate the impact of the scaling up and generate new knowledge on the effective components of psychological interventions.

The Challenge
Over 1 billion people
worldwide are currently living with a mental health or substance abuse problem, and the pandemic is expected to greatly increase that number. The vast majority receive no care at all.
Mental disorders represent the largest cost driver in health care: $2.5 trillion in global costs, which is projected to reach $6 trillion by 2030.
Despite the abundance of evidence showing that psychosocial interventions can prevent and treat a wide range of mental health problems, there is virtually 0% coverage globally.
The current efforts to build the mental health workforce and address the escalating need rely on in-person training and expert supervision.
These old-fashioned methods are resource intensive and impossible to scale. We need a radically different approach to address this crisis, which emphasizes science, scalability, and equity.

The Opportunity
We’re positioned to have a massive impact on the delivery of mental health services globally because of several key enabling trends
Mental health is recognized as an urgent area of action in most countries & UN Sustainable Development Goals
Brief psychological treatments are effective
Non-specialist providers can deliver them with a high degree of fidelity
Peer-to-peer models for supervision are effective for quality assurance
Digital training is effective, and access to technology is increasing globally

The Solution
We’re positioned to have a massive impact on the delivery of mental health services globally because of several key enabling trends
Digital Learning
Digital training on how to deliver a range of psychosocial treatments
Provider competency assessment to ensure skills and knowledge to effectively deliver care
Digital Quality Assurance
Decision support to match patient assessments with treatment
Remote coaching can help to support learning and progress through digital training programs
Peer supervision is scalable and as effective as expert supervision
Quality assessments can be quantified through structured rating of recordings of therapy sessions
Digital System Integration
Patient-facing apps can supplement provider delivered interventions
Prediction models can be developed, using quality and outcome data, to refine interventions
Continuing quality assessments offer a pathway to career progression for front-line providers to become experts
Aggregate provider performance can be used to evaluate impact of scaling up

Margaux Amara

Natali Carmio

Joshua Chauvin

John Naslund

Vikram Patel

Arthur Evans

Chris Fairburn

Peter Fonagy

Mala Gaonkar

Oliver Harrison

Thomas R. Insel

Andy Keller

Tarun Khanna

Ben Miller

Natasha Muller

Shekhar Saxena

Barbara Van Dahlen

Miranda Wolpert

David Clark

Pim Cuijpers

Sona Dimidjian

Chris Fairburn

Steven Hollon

Richard Velleman

Myrna Weissman

John Weisz

Gauri Divan

Peter Fonagy

Paul Ramchandani

Camilla Rosan

Alan Stein

Mark Tomlinson

Ed Tronick

Aisha Yousafzai

Urvita Bhatia

Brandon Kohrt

Neal Lesh

Abhijit Nadkarni

Juliana Restivo

Daisy R. Singla
Anushka Patel