Our Story
In 2008 a team of researchers from multiple universities came together to see if the same AI that is used to give directions or answer simple questions for web searches could be used to measure behavioral health providers’ empathy and engagement during clinical sessions. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, the researchers – including David Atkins (Lyssn CEO), Shrikanth Narayanan (Lyssn Chief Engineering Science Officer), and Zac Imel (Lyssn Chief Psychotherapy Science Officer) – developed measures over many years for evaluating client sessions, and then trained an AI-powered system to listen to sessions and perform complex evaluations of the interactions.
Creating Lyssn
Lyssn was born out of this research and fueled by the growing need for reliable quality metrics for behavioral health services. The five founders of Lyssn—with backgrounds in psychology, clinical research and training, speech engineering, software design and machine learning—believed they could make a greater impact on the delivery of mental health care and addiction services by bringing the technology out of an academic research setting and into the behavioral health care market. The vision: with a cost-effective AI-powered assessment platform for recording and managing session files, any practicing mental health professional or behavioral health organization could assess and continually improve the quality of services they provide.
Supporting Behavioral Health Providers
In 2017 David Atkins, Zac Imel, Mike Tanana, Shrikanth Narayanan and Tad Hirsch created Lyssn to further develop the AI-based technology with a goal of supporting training and supervision and providing a tool for quality assurance of behavioral health services. As of 2021 the Lyssn platform has been adopted by universities, telehealth providers and addiction and mental health clinics across the country and internationally. The platform is intuitive, easy to use, and HIPAA, FERPA and GDPR compliant with two-factor authentication and encryption security protocols. It is cloud-based and does not require external hardware. It includes functionality that is useful in both instructional and direct service environments, such as the ability to share recordings of sessions, and timestamp and comment on specific moments in the videos for supervision, instruction or peer review. It also offers metrics for the automatic assessment of counseling including Motivational Interviewing and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques. Lyssn can be used for recording and transcribing sessions with a built-in telehealth functionality, and also provides backend analytics for customers with their own API.
Our Team
Lyssn brings together behavioral health professionals, experts in AI, talented web developers, graphic designers, and more. We are united by our passion to support behavioral health clinicians and improve mental health services and outcomes.
Do you see yourself on our team? Check out our open positions.
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Hannah Alcoba
Qualitative Coder -
Dave Atkins
Chief Executive Officer | Co-founder -
Jenny Cheng
Clinical Research Coordinator | Family First Coordinator -
Melanie-Kukana Cordova
Qualitative Coder -
Torrey Creed
Senior Implementation Advisor -
Tanya Eng-Aquino
VP for Finance and Operations -
Aleksandra Foksman
Server-side Developer -
Elizabeth Hahn
Front End Developer -
Zac Imel
Chief Psychotherapy Science Officer | Co-founder -
Angela Klipsch
Technical Implementation Manager -
LeeAnne Lim
Qualitative Coder -
Lisa Long
Client Success Manager -
John Meade
Lead Front End Engineer -
Shri Narayanan
Chief Engineering Science Officer | Co-founder -
Brian Pace
Director of Clinical AI -
Roisin Slevin
Research Project Manager -
Sarah Stanco
Senior Designer -
Mike Tanana
Chief Technology Officer | Co-founder
Advisory Team
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Jonathan Ciampi
CEO, Bright Heart Health -
Karim Meghji
CTO, Remitly -
Ken Myer
Interim Executive/Leadership Advisor & Lecturer