Our mission
To improve the quality and effectiveness of mental health care by making the right information available to the right people at the right moment: clinicians, managers, funders, and the people receiving care.
About Cognovo
We build the information layer for mental health care.
Cognovo Pty Ltd is an Australian mental health digital innovations company. We help services understand what they deliver, measure whether it works, and use that knowledge to care for people better.
Our story
Founded on a familiar frustration
Anyone who has worked in mental health knows the pattern. Enormous effort goes into collecting information: assessments, outcome measures, activity data, incident reports. Remarkably little of it ever comes back to the people who collected it in a form they can use.
Clinicians fill in forms they never see again. Managers build reports by hand from exports that don't reconcile. Funders ask for outcomes that the system was never set up to capture. Meanwhile, the questions that matter most go unanswered. Is this programme helping? Who is it missing?
Cognovo exists to close that loop. We bring together clinical understanding, software engineering and evaluation method so that the information mental health services already generate can actually inform the care they provide.
Our slogan, in practice
Better Information. Better Mental Health Care.
It's not a tagline we bolted on afterwards. It's the test we apply to every engagement.
- Does this give someone the information they were missing?
- Will it reach them in time to change a decision?
- Can the people who collect the data see the benefit?
- Does the person receiving care end up better off?
Our vision
A mental health system where every service can answer, with confidence, what it does and what difference it makes, and where no one's recovery depends on information that never made it out of a filing system.
Our values
How we approach the work
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People before data points
Every record represents someone at a difficult time in their life. We design and analyse with that firmly in mind, and we treat the privacy of health information as non-negotiable.
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Honest findings
An evaluation that only ever confirms what the client hoped is worthless. We report what the evidence supports, including when it's uncomfortable, and we're explicit about the limits of what we can conclude.
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Usable over impressive
A dashboard nobody opens and a report nobody finishes have both failed. We optimise for the thing that gets used in the ward round and quoted in the board paper.
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Work with, not on
Services know their own context better than we ever will. We co-design with clinicians, staff and, where appropriate, people with lived experience, rather than arriving with an answer.
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Leave capability behind
Good consulting reduces the need for consultants. We document, train and hand over so your team can keep running what we build after the engagement ends.
Our expertise
Three disciplines in one team
Mental health digital innovations sits at an intersection. Doing it well means being credible in all three areas at once.
Clinical & sector knowledge
Understanding of mental health service models, clinical workflow, terminology, outcome measures and the reporting obligations services carry.
Software engineering
Modern, maintainable web and data applications built with security, access control and auditability designed in from the start.
Evaluation & analysis
Applied research method put to practical use: study design, statistical analysis, qualitative enquiry and implementation science.
Company details
The formal bits
- Registered entityCognovo Pty Ltd
- ABN76 698 095 475
- LocationAustralia. We work with services nationally, on site and remotely.
- General enquiriescontact@cognovo.com.au
Working on something we could help with?
Tell us about your service, your data or the question you're trying to answer. Initial conversations are always free.