Q&A with Zohar Beeri

Our target customers have a pain; they have a speech impairment. Just imagine that you cannot freely express your needs, desires, and dreams. It can actually happen to anyone at any age and for many reasons. For one in eight people across the world, this will become their reality, and saying what they want to say will be a persistent challenge.
The impact of speech disorders on various aspects of daily life can be devastating. It can impact self-confidence and self-esteem, hinder the achievement of career goals and the forming of relationships, as well as preclude people from realizing their potential. For some impairments, such as stuttering, research shows that they are often associated with depression and even suicide.
Though many great therapies have been shown to work, the best and most reliable therapies are not accessible to most people; either they are too expensive, too far away, or too dependent on the availability of a qualified clinician. Even if patients manage to overcome these accessibility problems, they and possibly their immediate environment (caregivers, school systems, and providers) will still have to carry a considerable burden of care. Beyond financial matters, this includes time investments not directly associated with care, access issues, adherence to in-clinic and off-clinic regimes with decreased effectiveness, and more.
Leaving aside accessibility, the burden of care, and the associated substantial costs (US$30b), the speech and language therapy market needs cannot be addressed due to the shortage of qualified clinicians.

Imagine if you could go online and get the best voice, speech, and language therapy, at any time, from any place, and on any device, receiving quality and dependable care at an affordable price.
This is Novotalk, the speech clinic of the future, and the future is what Novotalk is delivering right now.
• Novotalk eliminates the peripheral burden of care and allows patients to concentrate on the most important thing – a successful outcome of the therapy.
• Novotalk is a platform that is introducing validated speech and language therapeutic protocols to the online world, available 24/7 for people to sign up and undergo therapy.
• No more standing in traffic and parking, spending endless time scheduling, losing work days.
• All of this at a more affordable out-of-pocket cost.
• A Novotalk virtual clinician takes users through the learning and training process, enabling the supervising “real” clinicians to focus on measurable and accurate outcomes, work more efficiently, and help more people in less time.
• Novotalk removes the main barriers to superior and reliable therapy: accessibility, availability, and affordability.

When we presented the Novotalk system to the Mount Sinai team, they were very intrigued by the possibilities of a platform that provides both a best-of-breed clinical approach, combined with data-empowered clinical supervision. Understanding the impact of our “Clinic of the Future” approach, our joint venture agreement includes 3 components;
• A joint commercialization effort in the U.S. and Canada, in which Mount Sinai is providing guidance, facilitation, and clinical supervision to deliver the most professional support to our patient population.
• A joint R&D component to address additional speech and language conditions, in areas where Mount Sinai can provide the clinical protocols to be implemented on the platform.
• A clinical research component aimed at the clinical validation of the different clinical protocols (though we initially selected only in-clinic validated approaches), validate the asynchronous delivery model in general and also look into the macro-economics of asynchronous delivery in a broader perspective.