CredibleMind establishes a library of mental health resources, all vetted by machine learning — and professional experts

Fifty percent of the world's population struggles with mental health and seek expert-based resources to support their emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing. With demand far outstripping access to providers, many turn to the internet for answers. Yet, search engines are poor arbiters of trustworthy advice. In an age of disinformation, CredibleMind provides trusted mental health guidance by offering the largest online library of vetted and easily discoverable mental health resources. The company’s business model is to provide this content via tailored portals for communities, health systems, and employers who invest in the service as a benefit for their members and employees.

The biggest challenge for CredibleMind early on was managing a vast library of expert content without ignoring the importance of speed, orchestration, and scale. CredibleMind founders Deryk Van Brunt and Marcos Athanasoulis sought a software to automate resource vetting, organize content intuitively for consumers, and set content up for reuse across customer-specific portals to support their growing B2B client base. CredibleMind chose the Contentful content platform to solve all three. 

Adopting a content solution built for building 

The core value proposition of CredibleMind is that each resource on its site is sourced from a mental health expert and vetted — a process that’s equally valuable as it is time-consuming. When performed manually, a content editor has to find the resource, cross reference author and source credentials, and then attach metadata like title, description, author, and citations. All this could take up to an hour for each resource. And CredibleMind has hundreds of thousands of them. 

To deliver on this volume of content, CredibleMind had to think beyond the end product and create a system capable of automating as much of the editorial process as possible. Athanasoulis, CredibleMind’s Co-Founder and CTO, used Contentful at a previous company and had a hunch it’d be capable of supporting the editorial workflows and tools required for validation.

“I had our developers look at Contentful,” Athanasoulis said. “They played around with it and thought, ‘This is great. This is exactly what we need — an easy-to-use, customizable content entry system that we can automatically pull data into from other systems.’” The capabilities that Athanasoulis refers to stem from the platform’s Content Management API. In addition to pulling in and managing content from other systems, this API supports space creation, webhook and user management, task automation, and the building of content models.

Managing content credibility at scale

Using Contentful’s Content Management API and webhooks, the company built a series of automations that pull information from data sources considered to be reliable — healthcare credentials, LinkedIn affiliations, and academic journals. What’s collected builds out an author profile that’s stored within Contentful. To trigger this vetting process, a member of the CredibleMind team simply adds a video, podcast, article, app, blog, or other resource into the content platform, then the technology does the work. "Our webhooks call a function at AWS using its Lambda cloud function technology. It does some processing and scraping, then it updates the Contentful record and saves or publishes the content depending on how acceptable it is," Athanasoulis said.

CredibleMind’s machine learning model, built with Contentful and Python, gives the resource a “credibility score.” If it passes the set reliability threshold, the editor is notified that the asset is ready for publication. They’ll review the score and content, making adjustments as needed before hitting publish. A once hour-long process now takes just five minutes. Without Contentful, it's impossible to know exactly how long it'd take to manually vet and catalog the platform’s more than 15,000 resources. 

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Helping people find the right resources one app integration at a time

User experience is at the core of everything CredibleMind does — every build, configuration, and engagement. It’s not shocking, then, that CredibleMind paid a good deal of attention to making its massive library of vetted resources more discoverable to site visitors. 

Because those battling mental health concerns are used to — and might prefer — doing their own research to find answers, CredibleMind opted to make its library as self-service as possible. Developers built out three paths to help users get to the content they need most: a search bar, comprehensive filtering, and self-assessment quizzes.

Developers started with the basics. They added a search engine to the platform that’s powered by Algolia. With the tool readily available in the Contentful Marketplace, the integration took minutes. Developers configured the software to index resources stored within Contentful every hour, making them quickly accessible for anyone searching.

The company then considered how it could leverage tags to support building out beyond-basic filtering. Internal team members sifted through its existing content, tagged resources based on the following attributes: gender and age, mental health disorders, asset format, and therapy options. Those tags allow visitors to quickly find content that resonates with them on multiple levels. 

Lastly, CredibleMind developed an online assessment using predefined components from its content model. SurveyJS powers the quiz, while questions, answers, and the recommended resources shared as a result are all stored and categorized within Contentful.

“Everything is API-based, calling Contentful for the content,” Athanasoulis said. “Literally, everything about our site is in Contentful — except end-user information. Look at our menu, footer text, resources, quizzes, anything, really — it’s all reliant on Contentful.” 

Localizing content for an increasingly global audience

The ability to integrate technology seamlessly with the content platform’s APIs and build new functionality directly in the platform allows CredibleMind to optimize its content experiences to the benefit of users. This includes translating content into various languages via an integration with Google Translate. While CredibleMind’s English-first platform is available in Spanish and French Canadian, the company predicts available languages to double and even triple as it attracts larger, multilingual clients. 

Localization and customizations add a layer to CredibleMind’s user experience efforts. Athanasoulis and his team use the Contentful in-app localization to mark up content that needs additional, region-specific tailoring. 

To customize campaign and email content, the team pairs tags with specific audience segments. For example, content on postpartum depression might be promoted to women of childbearing age. These customizations have resulted in positive business outcomes for CredibleMind. Since implementation, email click-through rates have jumped from 15% to 40%.

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Creating customized client websites at scale 

While CredibleMind helps individuals improve their mental health, it’s also a B2B company, with a clientele that includes hospitals, health systems, and employers. CredibleMind takes its base platform and tailors it to the needs of its clients. 

The appeal of the platform is its “create once, publish everywhere” approach to content. CredibleMind can leverage its generic library content and publish it across client-specific portals, adding unique content, and removing what isn’t needed. Athanasoulis summed it up nicely: “We have a table in Contentful that houses client-specific customizations — logo, names, topics of interest, languages, etc. We start with the basic site and then use those parameters to reflect who that client is so it’s immediately recognizable for users.” This customization extends to specific content as well.

Often, hospitals and health systems will request that resources be added or removed from the platform. That provider might not offer certain medications or treatments, and in these cases it doesn’t want to confuse patients. CredibleMind can easily remove those resources from the custom platform or tweak specific modules if some of the information is still applicable. “We have overrides that allow clients to do things like remove elements within a menu or change the names of different items completely,” Athanasoulis added.

In the same way, client-specific resources can be added to the platform. “Clients sometimes have a deal with a mindfulness app — like Headspace or Calm — and they want to highlight that. Or, they may have an online therapy group they’d like to point people to. We have no problem bringing in those resources. It doesn’t take too much time or effort — just minutes, in fact — but it makes for a strong selling point,” Athanasoulis detailed.

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Closing gaps and providing comfort

CredibleMind has defined its business around meeting the needs of individuals striving to improve their mental health. By working with employers and organizations focused on the same goal — and leveraging content platform Contentful to realize the vision — CredibleMind is closing information gaps and providing much needed support to countless individuals.