Never alone between appointments: How Recovery Cat supports psychiatric treatment digitally

© Sibylle Pichot, Resilience Care SAS

20.10.2026
Never alone between appointments: How Recovery Cat supports psychiatric treatment digitally

Brain City Berlin

People with mental illness often see their treatment team only every few weeks. What happens in between frequently goes unnoticed until it turns into a crisis. Berlin start-up Recovery Cat has developed a digital therapy companion for exactly this gap, which patients use together with their clinicians. It was created at Charité and grew up in Brain City Berlin.

In September 2026, the French company Resilience, which specialises in medical monitoring, acquired Recovery Cat. Co-founder and CEO Dr Jakob Kaminski of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin explains how the idea came about and what makes the approach different. While founding and building the company, he continued to treat patients: “I always hold my clinic on Mondays; that’s important to me.” During his specialist training, he had already noticed a gap. At appointments, clinicians only see a snapshot; in between, patients are often left to cope on their own for weeks, and that is when crises develop.

An idea from everyday clinical practice

Recovery Cat aims to close this gap. “There are two interfaces: one for patients and one for clinicians.” During an appointment, the treatment team sets up the app together with the patient. Over the following days and weeks, patients record their symptoms, side effects and medication intake, as well as their personal resources, in other words, the things that do them good. This makes progress visible and allows trends to be spotted early. If a crisis appears to be developing, users automatically receive prompts, for example to book an earlier appointment or to draw on their own strategies, such as going outside or reaching out to friends and family. The aim is to head off crises before a hospital stay becomes necessary. “That’s often the tragic part: if you don’t step in early, crises can escalate to the point where inpatient treatment becomes necessary,” Kaminski explains.

Developed with patients

People with lived experience have been involved in the development from the start. “We developed Recovery Cat together with patients,” says Kaminski. This also applies to how data is handled, which is particularly sensitive in psychiatry. The team only collects what is necessary, uses servers in Europe and has designed the system architecture to keep risks as low as possible. “Of course, there’s no such thing as one hundred per cent security, but it was important to us that patients have control over their data and can genuinely share what they want to share.”

Behind this lies a more fundamental concern. Until now, decisions about what happens to the data have mainly been made by clinics and practices, which hold most of it. Kaminski says: “I place great importance on bringing about change so that patients are more involved in the processes around data sharing.”

More than an app: care with remuneration

What sets Recovery Cat apart from many other health apps is that it is firmly embedded in treatment. “I am deeply convinced that technology alone doesn’t work,” says Kaminski. The team designed Recovery Cat “specifically as a hybrid care model, developing not only the software but also the hardware”, he says. By “hardware”, he means the care model behind it, including remuneration for the psychiatrists and healthcare professionals who use the tool.

To this end, Recovery Cat has concluded a selective contract with Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), one of Germany’s statutory health insurers. TK covers the costs for its members, and doctors are paid for analysing and assessing the data and contributing their expertise. This is where Kaminski sees the difference from digital health applications (DiGA), which patients mostly use on their own: for continuous support from clinicians, there is still no suitable remuneration model. According to industry reports, Recovery Cat is used in almost 20 clinics and practices in five German federal states.

Initial results support the approach. According to Kaminski, the team was able to show in its first feasibility study that the number of hospitalisations fell. He is cautious in his assessment: “That was a first indication.” The underlying principle of basing treatment on measurable progress, known as measurement-based care, has been supported by scientific evidence for decades, which the team summarised in a meta-analysis. Both the feasibility study and the meta-analysis were published in 2025; the team is currently analysing further data.

Short distances in Brain City Berlin

In Kaminski’s view, Berlin was a good place to found the company for several reasons. Charité brought together clinical practice, research and “technology transfer expertise” in one place, and with them “the short distances” that a start-up needs in its early phase. Before the company was founded in 2022, the project had already received support from the Digital Health Accelerator of the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) and from the Prototype Fund. In addition, Recovery Cat raised capital from Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) together with private investors. As a third advantage, Kaminski cites the many talented and committed people in the city: “We really had no problems finding talented staff. That’s something quite special about Berlin, I think.”

Kaminski advises doctors who want to start their own company to draw on their clinical experience: “The great thing is that with a clinical background, you can really think from the problem outwards.” It is just as important, he says, to involve the perspective of patients from the very beginning. “I strongly recommend bringing patients into the team. That’s really important.”

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