LIV: Using AI to Transform the Entry Point to Mental Health Care

The Challenge

More than one billion people worldwide live with mental health conditions, yet health systems continue to struggle with limited clinical capacity, long wait times, and increasingly complex patient needs. The result is a critical bottleneck at one of the earliest stages of care: determining who needs help, how urgently they need it, and what type of care should come next.

In Israel, a surge in trauma-related mental health needs brought this global challenge into even sharper focus, exposing the limitations of existing manpower and infrastructure at a time of rapidly increasing demand.

At the point of entry, these pressures create several practical challenges:

• Identifying urgency — recognizing which patients require immediate specialist intervention and which can safely wait
• Matching patients to care — determining the appropriate clinical pathway based on individual needs
• Using specialist time effectively — giving clinicians the information they need without adding unnecessary intake burden
• Scaling assessment — extending limited psychiatric resources across a growing number of patients

Sheba’s Answer

The answer began with a clinical question: 

Could AI help psychiatric clinicians meet the growing demand for mental health care by streamlining assessment and triage, identifying urgent cases, and supporting clinical decisions while keeping human expertise at the center?

Developed under the clinical direction of Prof. Mark Weiser and Dr. Asaf Caspi of Sheba’s Psychiatry and trained on psychiatric textbooks, LIV uses generative AI to conduct an initial psychiatric intake through natural conversation by voice or text. The platform gathers and organizes patient information, assesses urgency, and provides clinicians with structured insights to support decisions about what care is needed and when.

LIV was designed not to replace mental health professionals, but to extend their capacity, helping them identify patients who require immediate attention while supporting those who can safely wait for specialist care.

To make that possible, LIV brings several capabilities together within a single platform:

• Validated through simulation — diagnostic and triage accuracy tested against trained actors from MSR – Israel Center for Medical Simulation prior to deployment
• Natural interaction — psychiatric intake through conversational voice or text in multiple languages
• Earlier risk identification — analysis of clinical information, facial expressions, voice patterns, and additional indicators to help flag high-risk situations
• Prioritized access — support in distinguishing urgent cases from those that can safely wait
• Support while waiting — digital therapeutic tools can help patients during the period before specialist care
• Built safely for scale — full HIPAA compliance and integration with existing clinical systems across mobile and desktop environments

“At Sheba, we created LIV, an AI avatar that’s able to diagnose mental health conditions, determine the severity, and triage the patients who would need to see a mental health specialist today versus who can wait a few weeks or months to see that human specialist, and in the meantime we provide them with digital tools for mindfulness and other capabilities that would help them along the way.”– Prof. Eyal Zimlichman, Chief Innovation & Transformation Officer, Sheba Medical Center

Implementation

LIV supports the patient journey 24/7 from initial intake through clinical review and next steps, using AI to prepare clinicians for decisions rather than make those decisions in their place.

• Phase 1: Patient Intake
  Patients describe their concerns, symptoms, and relevant history through a natural voice- or text-based conversation.
• Phase 2: Assessment & Prioritization
  LIV analyzes the information to help identify severity, potential risks, and the urgency of specialist intervention.
• Phase 3: Clinical Review
  Clinicians receive a structured summary and relevant insights to support further evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment planning.
• Phase 4: Next-Step Support
  Patients can be directed toward the appropriate level of care, while digital tools provide additional support for those waiting to see a mental health specialist.

In Practice

LIV was developed through Sheba’s ARC innovation ecosystem, tested and validated in partnership with MSR, and has become the flagship product of Mentaily, a startup founded in 2024 by senior Sheba clinicians Prof. Mark Weiser, Dr. Asaf Caspi, and Dr. Daniel Cohen in partnership with CEO Iris Shtein and entrepreneur Guy Yachin. 

The technology has since expanded across hospitals, HMOs, rehabilitation centers, and government organizations in Israel, with Mentaily also working with security and defense organizations to tailor the system to high-need populations. In May 2026, Israel’s Ministry of Health approved LIV for clinical decision support in psychiatric triage, marking an important step toward broader implementation.

The Broader Impact

What began as a response to limited mental health capacity has developed into a platform with applications across healthcare systems and high-need populations.

• Diagnostic accuracy — Over 92% correlation with clinicians’ assessments
• Clinical impact — contributing to improving PTSD, anxiety, and depression outcomes
• Operational efficiency — accelerating intake and triage while supporting clinician productivity
• National deployment — expanding across hospitals, HMOs, rehabilitation centers, and government organizations
• Regulatory validation — approved by Israel’s Ministry of Health for clinical decision support
• International reach — collaborations extending to organizations around the world
• Investment in scale — Mentaily raised $3 million in seed funding in 2025 to support continued development and expansion

“LIV enables real-time detection of deterioration and high-risk situations, allowing clinical teams to intervene early, with precision. By supporting clinical decision-making and optimizing workforce allocation, we help address the global shortage of mental health professionals. Our scalable platform not only enhances access and accuracy, but also empowers systems to prioritize care where it’s needed most, transforming psychiatric triage at a national and global level.”

– Iris Shtein, CEO and Co-Founder of Mentaily

Redefining the Possible

LIV rethinks one of mental health care’s most consequential bottlenecks: the point at which a person enters the system and clinicians must determine what they need, how urgently they need it, and what should happen next.

By using AI to support this early stage of care, LIV offers a way to extend limited clinical resources across a growing patient population while keeping human expertise at the center of decision-making. 

Its evolution from a clinical challenge at Sheba to a nationally approved platform demonstrates how healthcare innovation can help systems respond to a rising global demand for mental health care.