Health Leadership Apprentice Program coordinator Landon A. Hackley authored the following post.
Shiva Velingker is a recent University of Texas at Austin graduate who double majored in computer science and humanities with an emphasis in health tech and policy. He joined the Health Leadership Apprentice (HLA) Program in spring 2018 to pursue a profound idea that stemmed from a very personal experience of his.
Since enrolling at UT Austin, Velingker has kept a personal journal to track his own experiences and development. He wanted a more efficient way of organizing what he was writing without the need to scan through all of his entries, now totaling over 1 million words. His passion for journaling and his expertise in computer science ultimately merged, resulting in a focus area for his senior thesis and a soon-to-be released mental health journaling application called UpLift.
Velingker said HLA was an integral part of the development of his project, for which he is eternally grateful.
UpLift is an app for journaling that can scan entries and pull out themes and behavioral patterns within those entries to fill the knowledge gap between patient appointments with their therapists. His goal is to help therapists understand their patients better by keeping up with the patient’s daily journaling through pattern recognition algorithms.
“Oftentimes, a patient will pay — particularly in Austin — around $150 an hour to see their therapist,” Velingker said, “and 15 minutes or more of that time is spent by the therapist trying to understand the patient better and understand what happened since their last appointment.”
He said this was one of the factors that led him to come up with a way to give therapists more insight into what exactly is driving their patient’s behavior without having to take up that time during a session.
With the app, Velingker said he is able to track patterns that may indicate signs of depression and suicidality and certain emotions and their changes, such as sudden increases in sadness or happiness. He hopes that by being able to track these patterns, he can help therapists and doctors catch things before they become problematic.
Velingker said the idea stemmed from his personal experience as an avid journaler who, after realizing his entries had grown to over 1 million words combined, wanted to create a way to track his personal character development since his freshman year. With his skill and passion for coding, he decided to build an application that could do it for him. What started as a personal self-help app ended up becoming his senior thesis.
Velingker joined HLA to build on his idea with the help of HLA program director and tech guru Steve Steffensen, M.D. His time in the HLA program also connected him with mentors in the Health Ecosystem commercialization team at Dell Medical School, who helped him “pivot [his] idea from a self-help app to a mental health app” that is nearing production.
“My HLA mentors guided me to think more about mental health and how my application could work in that space, which is when my project really took off,” Velingker said.
After more than two years of development, Velingker is still going strong. He is working to integrate automated insight tools to make the app as effective and efficient as possible. He wants to make the interface for therapists useful and smooth, so it can be helpful in the understanding and treatment of patients. His vision is to help UT Austin students, and potentially others, in their long-term care, so transferring therapists and other potential roadblocks won’t be such a hindrance to the continuity of care.
Velingker now works at Facebook, where he focuses on the intersection between entrepreneurship and technology. He plans to work there for several years. Afterward, he plans to obtain an MBA from Harvard University and, he said, “use all of my experiences to take an entrepreneurial mindset into health care and change things from within.”
If you are interested in learning more about Velingker’s work, reach out to an HLA program coordinator.