Female Founder Series: From Symptom Checklists to Blood Work: Henna Karna on Building Mental Health Care Outside the System

Mental health care starts with a symptom checklist. Henna Karna thinks that is the wrong first question, and she is betting on blood work, wearable data, and the biochemistry a patient can actually change. Karna was global actuarial CIO at AIG, global chief data officer at AXA XL, and ran Google Cloud's insurance, reinsurance and risk management solutions before co-founding NeuroVitals. Research at Harvard on the metabolic drivers of mental illness convinced her that demand for this shift would not come from inside the system, so she built for the member first.

For anyone running a behavioral health service line, the useful part is the back half: what happens when a patient's covered visits run out, why people regress before the next plan year, and what changes when someone walks into a session with three weeks of their own sleep and cortisol data instead of nowhere to start. Plus how she handles escalation, human review, and training population bias in a category where a wrong answer matters.

Dr. Henna Karna, Co-founder and President, NeuroVitals

Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live

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