Business View Caribbean | January 2021

21 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN JANUARY 2021 The company is also working with athletes to enhance performance. “We’ve trained a few Olympian athletes. We’ve also trained junior athletes and we saw significant improvements with their performance on and off the field.” The use of neuroscience in sports is now a common practice in professional leagues such as Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Football League. However, the lack of resources in most developing countries is limiting the implementation of new neuroscience-driven techniques in sports. Allegori is creating the opportunity to use neuroscience in an affordable way to change the limits of performance for professional athletes across the Global South. Scaling up the business The system employed by Allegori is producing substantial changes in people’s lives. From a surgeon with anxiety and PTSD that was able to stop constant panic attacks in only six sessions, to breakthroughs in pain management and the learning capabilities of patients with autism. But now the company faces the question of how to scale up and maintain momentum. While they’re developing services that can be useful to people everywhere, exploring new alternatives to deploy and deliver their products is essential to facilitate expansion. “We are transitioning into providing our services entirely remotely”, says Kheston. This digital transformation could provide access to new markets and funding opportunities. Allegori’s methodology is also integrating data analytics to improve its services. Using data on neural activity has become a promising area of study for its potential to help understand complementary details about the human brain. Kheston notes, “We record data for each one of our clients. We’ve collected over seven hundred million points of data. We use those insights to make the sessions better and more useful for our clients. On one hand is data from just one individual at a time but it is a substantial amount of data. And it is something empirical, you can’t cheat the brain activity, you can’t lie.” With an enhanced product, Allegori is positioning an innovative value proposition. As the health insurance market shifts towards value-based payments to replace a fee-for- service model, Allegori could play a key role in this transition. Integrating applied neuroscience with primary care as a default practice could reduce ER visits and other care while lowering overall medical cost. “The good health of the customer increases the likelihood of collecting fully under premium,” says Kheston. “I don’t mean to turn someone into a monetary unit but there is value in preserving and fortifying the mind.” Although Allegori faces the traditional challenges of startups trying to live up to their potential, including the need to inject capital and develop partnerships, the many potential applications of these products and its prospects to revolutionize healthcare goes beyond Trinidad and Tobago. A more actionable and empowering way to regulate behavior and mindsets creates opportunity to engage new sectors of the population. Making those techniques accessible could bring incredible benefits for many countries in Latin America and the broader Global South. www.allegori.org *Article submitted by Bryan Ch. Campbell Romero, a freelance writer and independent analyst covering public policy and political risk in Latin American & Caribbean. Originally from Cuba, Bryan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy (Licenciatura en Filosofía) from the University of Havana. He tweets at @bchCampbell