The science
Wellness is an industry full of vibes. Aha Health is built instead on validated instruments, evidence-based therapies, and the research literatures on sleep, psychological safety, and whole-person health — with outcomes measured the way clinicians measure them: pre and post, against baselines.
Annual engagement surveys capture how people felt about the survey. Aha uses brief, validated instruments — the PHQ-9 for depression and GAD-7 for anxiety are among the most studied screening tools in clinical medicine — delivered as 2-minute check-ins. Frequent, low-burden sampling of mood in daily life follows the logic of ecological momentary assessment: ask less, ask often, and in the moment, and you get signal that retrospective surveys structurally miss.
Every method on the platform has a clinical literature behind it. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy remains the most-researched psychotherapy for depression and anxiety. EMDR is recommended in international guidelines for trauma. DBT for emotional dysregulation and ACT for values-based behaviour change extend the toolkit. Our therapists are matched to the concern — because the evidence says the method should fit the problem, not the other way around.
The WHO estimates 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety — about US$1 trillion in lost productivity. Most of that cost accrues silently, long before anyone books a session. Proactive screening, at-risk flagging, and Milo's escalation pathway exist because the clinical trajectory of most mental health conditions is far better when intervention is early. Waiting for the less-than-5% who self-refer to an EAP is a structural failure, not an employee one.
The biopsychosocial model — medicine's standard frame since Engel proposed it in 1977 — says health is produced by biology, psychology, and social context together. The platform is built on it: poor sleep is among the strongest prospective predictors of burnout; chronic musculoskeletal pain and depression are bidirectionally linked; financial stress shows up in clinical anxiety measures. A platform that addresses only one dimension is structurally blind to the others.
Insomnia symptoms prospectively predict burnout, depression onset, and accident risk. CBT-I — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia — is the first-line recommendation of the American College of Physicians and sleep medicine bodies, outperforming medication on durability. It's delivered 1-on-1 in the Body module, and population-level sleep signal feeds the early-warning layer.
Three decades of research, from Amy Edmondson's foundational work to Google's Project Aristotle, converge on the same finding: whether people feel safe to speak up is the strongest team-level predictor of performance. It's also trainable. Our manager programmes, team interventions, and Aha Talks all target it directly — and our psychological safety assessments track whether it's moving.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is an 8-week structured protocol with hundreds of trials behind it — meaningfully different from a meditation app subscription. When we deliver MBSR, we deliver the full programme, as a group journey, with certified instructors. The dose matters.
People judge experiences disproportionately by their most intense moment and their ending — Kahneman's peak-end rule. Applied to employment: the bench period, the PIP, and the last day shape how an employee remembers years of work, what they tell candidates, and whether they return. Advocate exists because the moments that matter most to memory are precisely the ones organisations handle worst.
Compassion without evidence is a wish. Evidence without compassion is a spreadsheet. We refuse to choose.
Outcomes, not activity
Session counts and app opens are activity. Outcomes are pre/post assessment scores, validated wellbeing indices moving over quarters, and at-risk cohorts shrinking. Every organisation gets both — but we hold ourselves to the second kind.
Read more on how this lands in practice on the blog, or see what leadership receives on the organisational intelligence page.
Thirty minutes with a founder — see what compassionate, accountable care looks like for your organisation. A tailored proposal inside five working days.