Notes From the Field

Lessons from the frontlines of a digital health revolution

What have I learnt while developing digital mindfulness training programs in six languages alongside psychiatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists, social workers, counsellors, coaches, nurses, artists and MDs around the world?

A Truly Global Network

First, What strikes me time and again is the breadth and depth of rigorously trained, deeply committed healthcare workers delivering evidence based mindfulness training to patients around the world. From Singapore and China, from Germany and the Netherlands and over to the Americas, dedicated professionals are supporting patients’ healing journey with this time-tested, patient-centred approach to healing. And they are partnering with MI in a shared mission to make mental health training accessible to every human.

One example of many comes from Brazil, where Dr. Edilaine Cristina da Silva Gherardi-Donato is supporting MI’s kidney cancer trial with AmDTx by delivering long-form guided meditations that train patients to manage the fears and anxieties of a recurring cancer diagnosis. Edilaine is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Psychiatric Nursing and Human Sciences at the Nursing School at the University of San Paulo. Deeply engaged in clinical research, she is also one of Brazil’s leading trainers. A great illustration of her craft is her meditation Como Folhas no Rio, a classic practice of observing thoughts with curiosity, kindness and non-attachment — letting them flow into and out of conscious thought like leaves floating down a river.

Pioneering Clinical Research

Complementing MI’s global network of mindfulness trainers who are transforming health care is the essential work of researchers and clinicians applying the scientific method to demonstrate that digitally-delivered mindfulness training can be just as effective, or better, than traditional therapies for patients with mental illnesses, including anxiety and depression. And that’s just the beginning. At MI, we are working with Canadian researchers to assess the efficacy of a proprietary mindfulness-based training program for paediatric concussion patients. The groundbreaking work, led by psychologists Dr. Andrée-Anne Ledoux of the University of Ottawa and Dr. Mollie Cairncross of Simon Fraser University, explores the possibility that mindfulness can improve the healing process, and includes functional magnetic resonance imaging scans (fMRIs) to measure and map the brain activity of study participants as they engage with our digital therapeutics platform AmDTx. This is unparalleled work illustrates how academic researchers around the world are partnering with pioneering companies like MI to transform the patient journey for the better.

A Shared Mission

The mainstream acceptance of mental health training by patients, healers and researchers has ushered in a new era of person-centered medicine. Mindfulness is no longer considered a soft skill but an essential part of overall health care. This has been made possible, of course, by the researchers whose work demonstrates that mindfulness training is as effective or better than more expensive, invasive medical interventions like pharmacotherapy and by the growing numbers of health care professionals committed to delivering the therapy to patients.

The one missing ingredient is, of course, scale. After all, what good is clinically-validated mental health training if patients in small towns and far off countries can’t access it? That’s where we at MI come in. Our partnerships with therapists, clinicians and academics — embodied in a multitude of small scale experiments and large randomised controlled trials now underway in oncology, concussion, maternal health, obesity and mental health — positions AmDTx as a central player in the quiet revolution now underway in healthcare, where patients come first, mind and body. I know this because I see it every day in the work I do for a company who’s mission is no less than to make Effective and Accessible Healthcare for Every Human.

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Mindfulness is an evidence based, mind-body intervention that blends eastern and western methods of mental training to enhance attention, self-awareness and emotion regulation. Since the 1970s, it has time and again shown to improve the mental health and social skills and those who engage in the training as prescribed, typically through 8-week programs and more recently, thanks to companies like Mobio Interactive, clinically validated digital interventions like AmDTx.

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Mark Thoburn is Chief of Content at Mobio Interactive Pte Ltd.