OPM is a mobile app for your campus that provides students with on-demand, personalized wellness experiences created by top psychologists AND students. The app enables anyone in your community to record their own insights, and or, listen to other student's best solutions on any topic. Open 24/7, the app surfaces the wisdom and beauty that exists on your campus and shares it with students exactly when they need it.

At scale, OPM will produce unlimited variations of the following experience on your campus tens of thousands of times each year, depending on the size of your campus: Janice is a freshman undergraduate lying on her dorm room bed at 3AM. She's far from home, overwhelmed with loneliness and can't sleep. Right now she's staring at her phone wondering if she should be here. She taps her OPM app hoping to find connection — maybe a supportive thought shared by another student. Within a minute, she hears a solution for loneliness that resonates. It's a two-minute audio recording that was shared by a junior on your campus a few days ago. Feeling a little better now, Janice settles into a personalized meditation session that further guides her away from stress while teaching her a bit about coping through loneliness. Finally, she closes her eyes and the app helps her fall asleep.

We've tested OPM extensively with students and they love it. We've also implemented strong privacy controls to prevent negative experiences. We only access the minimum user-data necessary for the app to run effectively. Our ethos is to develop technology carefully while prioritizing delivering the key values to your campus - connecting students when and how they want to be connected and providing world class wellness experiences 24/7.

It's easy. You decide you want to give the app to your students and we deliver a customized app for your campus. We only need to know the total number of students you want to give access to the app, and a phone number for your students to call in case they ever want to get in touch with local professional help. We'll dedicate a community manager to your campus to help your OPM app grow smoothly.

$10-$30 per student per year depending on the OPM programs you select and the number of students you have.

"Connecting authentically and deeply with others across all dimensions of life enriches the human spirit. The sense of community resulting from such connections is a hallmark of a supportive campus environment, which we know is an important feature in enhancing student learning." - George D. Kuh, Chancellor's Professor and Director, National Survey of Student Engagement, Indiana University

Mental health and wellness is a multi-billion dollar college health issue. The stark data is detailed in a question further below. Suffice it to say here, 60% of students report overwhelming anxiety and only 15% of students see a college counseling center therapist. Meanwhile, college students spend ~5 hours a day on their smartphones on average — and counseling center therapists can only see so many patients in a day. Trust me, we are not scalable. I know this because I was a college counseling center therapist for years — this is Sean Sullivan writing.

Student life today, including searching for emotional help, increasingly occurs on smartphones. More than 60 million people will search on a smartphone of relief from depression, stress and anxiety this year. We built OPM as a mobile wellness tool for students who may not currently need therapy, or be willing to reach out for help, but who benefit enormously, emotionally and developmentally, from being authentically (and optionally, anonymously) connected to highly personalized wellness experiences AND being supported by the campus community when they need it most.

During Spring 2019, we conducted research with students on over a dozen campuses. Students love OPM. And as far as we know, no other app provides fresh and personalized wellness and support sessions created specifically for students by psychologists AND their peers. Meanwhile, if and when a student ever wants in-person professional help, your campus's 24-hour contact phone number is always accessible from the app.

Connecting at-risk students to the community is the most efficient and effective way we've found to address the many student wellness trends and issues campuses face. OPM is a primary intervention in support of the Cube Model of Campus-Wide Strategic Planning for Distressed and Distressing Students targeting intervention at multiple levels ranging from the individual to the community to stimulate campus wide dialogue about a range of issues that are critical underpinnings of successful communities. The app provides a forum for surfacing and churning issues to bring awareness to the forefront of campus consciousness. OPM is a tool for engaging issues on campus all the time, i.e., tens of thousands of times per year when your campus's app is at scale.

Every university professional is aware of the overwhelming daily student mental health challenges on college campuses particularly. The data is stark. Young adults aged 18-25 years old have the highest prevalence of any mental illness (AMI) (25.8%). >60% of college students report suffering from anxiety. ~40 percent report feeling so depressed they had difficulty functioning and nearly three-quarters (73 percent) report they could have used more emotional support in the past year. The number one reason cited for not seeking help was fear of stigma. Students can use OPM anonymously and connecting to on-campus help is only one tap away.

Student mental health issues are exacerbated by substance abuse. A study done over 2 years found that over 500,000 students were unintentionally injured because of drinking and more than 600,000 were hit/assaulted by another drinking student.Most dangerous is that 20% of students report being so stressed they have considered self-harm or suicide. 6% of undergraduate and 4% of graduate students have seriously considered suicide in the last year. Nearly half of those students did not tell anyone about it. Meanwhile, 1.5% of college students have attempted suicide; and over 1,100 students commit suicide on college campuses each year.

Contributing pressure to these growing demands on campuses include greater public scrutiny, increased threat of litigation, increasingly diverse student bodies, improved medications enabling increasingly at risk students to enroll and succeed in higher education, increased media attention on mental health issues, improving non-medication mental health treatments, decreased stigma, anxiety provoking domestic and international insecurity, increased cultural pressures including competition, and increased family dysfunction, to name a few. According to a NAMI study, over 45% of students who withdrew due to mental illness did not seek help for their conditions.

References:
https://www.ajmc.com/focus-of-the-week/mental-heal...
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-...
http://www.collegedegreesearch.net/student-suicides/
https://www.sprc.org/sites/default/files/migrate/l...

"We are always working as psychologists, as psychotherapists, to acquaint people with what help and resources are available to them." - Scott Strader, Ph.D., Director of Counseling Services, University of South Florida

PROBLEM: University mental health professionals need scalable support. While campus counseling center staff sizes are remaining static or even decreasing nationally, institutions of higher education enroll more students with mental health problems today than ever before. As a result, demand for mental health and counseling services is increasing on most college campuses. Between the fall of 2009 and spring of 2015, the number of students who visited campus counseling centers increased by more than 30 percent. Meanwhile, college and university personnel are regularly asked about how they are managing campus problems.

SOLUTION: The student wellness design and value of OPM supports campus counseling services. The app is ideal for use between counseling session for students who are in therapy. It also helps connect students who are not in therapy, and enables counseling center staff to engage the campus community in critical campus wellness dialogue on student's smartphones anytime.

OPM's college development efforts also involve ongoing research to continually assess OPM's efficacy and optimize how to provide students with effective connection and support when and how they want and in the way(s) they benefit most. We also collaborate with leaders in specific specialties to further support each campus's unique needs. If a research and development agenda resonates, let's discuss about how we might collaborate.

Reference
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/education/learn...

We are continually collecting pre-use and post-use data from students who are using the OPM app. Students are using the app to listen to, record and share insights. Each of those data points is an important hurdle for digital health and wellness products. We are currently collecting, analyzing and implementing learnings from our initial data collection, including:

• Percent of target users report, "I would be very disappointed if I could not use OPM any more."
  
• NPS score for, "I would recommend this app to a friend."
• Percent of students who are using the app to listen to, record and share insights.
• Significance of increase in reported feelings of connection on campus
• Significance of increase in reported feelings of empathy for fellow students
• Significance of increase in reported awareness of emotional challenges classmates encounter
• Significance of increase in student's likelihood of "reaching out for professional help."
• Significance of reported reductions in student's feelings of loneliness

We continue to assess how strongly effects sustain, and or, grow. We're happy to discuss our latest findings. We are also conducting research with campus partners. Let's improve together!

Initially, we launch to students on your campus who have expressed interest in wellness or mental health, and or, who are involved in health and wellness advocacy. From there, we grow the app by facilitating student's sharing their favorite personal insights with other students. We can also market to your students through social media, if you would like. We also recommend your campus provides incentives for student engagement with the app. Let's talk about the best ways to get your OPM app connecting students at your campus at scale!