May22239 Australian CEO Excellence Awards 2024 | 6 At its core, SafeWatch is the company behind a pioneering namesake app that has been meticulously designed to facilitate compassionate care and leave a lasting impact on wellbeing. Much more than your standard smartphone app, SafeWatch instead acts as a companion, creating a safe and secure space that simultaneously enhances the integral human component of care and tackles the stigma that exists around mental health. SafeWatch is the brainchild of Founder & CEO Shane Muller, who officially released the platform to the market in November 2023. Born, raised, and ultimately shaped in Sri Lanka, Shane Muller created SafeWatch from an observation that he had a few years ago. Now living in Australia, Shane noticed that people’s mental wellness was suffering, and he made a public statement declaring his intentions to utilise technology to drive significant positive change in this space. Beginning as simply an idea, the early days of SafeWatch saw it exist as little more than just the nucleus, with no name, logo, or any other defining features to speak of. This was late 2019. The pandemic of 2020 that drove the world into lockdown only reinforced the importance of what Shane was attempting to do, and he spent the year developing the project, based off of the research that he was carrying out concurrently. The sad truth is that the most dire cases of poor mental wellness lead to self-harm and suicide, and the most heartbreaking thing for Shane was that most people around the affected individual say, “I had no idea”. What SafeWatch has subsequently evolved into aims that nobody will ever have to speak this phrase again. SafeWatch achieves this by effectively bridging the gap between medical specialists and patients outside of clinic environments, supporting the former as they devise and implement the necessary interventions for the latter on their journey of discovery and recovery. From guiding a patient through a care and safety plan to allowing them to document the progress between their support and therapy sessions, SafeWatch is a real-time solution that provides the data and the intelligence that matters to help unlock better mental health for all. Beginning in the midst of the pandemic made things more difficult for Shane, who was forced to lead a diverse team of amazing individuals, mental health professionals, and board members all through online channels. It is for this reason that dedication and persistence are two of SafeWatch’s defining anchors to this day, as it was a combination of the two that resulted in the service securing its first patients using the platform in June 2023, ahead of the public launch five months later. A multi-lingual (Chinese) version then followed in May the following year. Despite the encompassing approach to mental health embodied by the platform, which prides itself on being designed for “everybody”, trying to distinguish itself in a market where there are more than 20,000 apps fighting for the top spot means that being unique is paramount. It is for this reason that Shane and the team implemented the “Village Approach to Wellbeing” across their service. This sees the platform grounded in the realistic concept of a close-knit village so that nobody’s mental health goes unnoticed – much like a neighbourhood watch. Aside from the above, there is one further element that truly solidifies SafeWatch as a standout in a market defined by an abundance of choice. By keeping the data of patients totally private, even from the company itself, users of the app can feel entirely secure. As Shane himself explains it, “only the individual person has access to and can control their own data – there is no Big Brother, no big tech, and no big government controlling data.” To their knowledge, they are the only people in this sphere to offer such a feature. Where most apps in the wellness category do just one thing – be it focusing on sleep, diet, yoga, or questionnaires for example – SafeWatch’s comprehensive approach sees it spans more than 15 different capabilities and modules in this field, slowly but surely replacing the endless alternatives as it continues to grow and develop. Appealing to all and doing so in such a secure way that even the UK’s Prime Minister could be using the app and the SafeWatch team would not be unaware, thereby setting a new standard of privacy for everyone’s benefit. For the instrumental role that Founder Shane Muller has played in this project up to this point and continues to do so as the platform gains traction, it is our pleasure to celebrate him with this well deserved award. Contact: Shane Muller Company: SafeWatch www.safewatch.care Best Community, Security & Privacy Solutions CEO 2024: Shane Muller Aug24112
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