Orygen Digital

Orygen Digital

Orygen Digital

Overview

At Orygen Digital we believe that all young people and families have the right to effective mental health care, without limits. Our mission is to make all youth mental health services in Australia digitally enhanced within five years. We strive to achieve this through new methods and ways of working that harness technology, science and creativity to transform mental health care as we know it.

Our work is driven by:

  • Youth and family-led innovation: we work alongside young people and their families to design and deliver technology-based mental health care that is lovable and evidence-based.
  • Multi-disciplinary collaboration: our in-house innovation team blends diverse talent from 15 different disciplines across creative, computational, clinical and research domains to arrive at novel digital solutions to old problems in youth mental health care.
  • Digitally-enhanced clinical services: we partner closely with traditional clinical services to fully embed our effective and innovative technologies, enhancing but never replacing existing service delivery and addressing the major limitations of current care.

Orygen Digital is led by Professor Mario Alvarez-Jimenez

 

Watch a video from Orygen Digital General Manager Jon Myer below.

SOLUTIONS: MOST 

Orygen Digital has already developed world-leading youth mental health technologies. Our flagship digital mental health service MOST is the first single digital solution specifically designed to integrate with, and address, the key limitations of current youth mental health services. It has been designed with and for young people and existing services , providing clinicians with evidence-based tools that can be used across the diagnostic and severity spectrums and all stages of treatment.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, MOST was generously supported by a $6m grant from the Victorian Government to fast track its roll-out across the state, and a $1m grant from the Telstra Foundation to iterate and improve the MOST technology platform.

The MOST platform has also been supported by funding from the Queensland Government and the Children's Hospital Foundation to support young people in Queensland. The New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory governments have also funded MOST pilots in their regions.

The suite of tools provided by MOST includes:

  • Personalised therapy programs: these programs are continuously targeted to each young person’s unique needs and preferences by automated processes and specialist clinicians.
  • Targeted coping support: a diverse digital toolkit of coping supports designed to carry young people through difficult moments, while building their skills and confidence for future resilience.
  • Tailored human support: including vocational specialists, peer workers and clinicians.
  • Social connection: a safe, virtual support network of young people with a shared experience of mental ill-health, carefully moderated to foster meaningful social connection and combat isolation and self-stigma.
  • Real-time mental health tracking: including progress towards goals and monitoring of risk.

To date, two large randomised controlled trials and 10 pilot studies have shown MOST prototypes to be safe, effective and engaging for young people at all stages of treatment and across diagnostic and severity spectrums.

Learn more about MOST

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

In addition to MOST, Orygen Digital continues to explore a range of research and development areas including: