Press release
Recovery Cat, an app that helps with the treatment of severe mental illnesses, is now available to TK insurees

Recovery Cat is an app that provides digital therapy support to people with severe mental illnesses. Effective immediately, patients who are insured with Techniker Krankenkasse (TK) can use the Recovery Cat service free of charge. Further insurances will follow. A spin-off from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), Recovery Cat is thus now being incorporated into real-life care settings. This once again demonstrates the success of Charité BIH Innovation’s translational development programs, which provide tangible benefits to a broad spectrum of patients.

After release from inpatient treatment, people with severe mental illnesses frequently have to fend for themselves for a long period of time. This often leads them to break off their treatment, which can result in further crises that make it necessary to go back to the hospital. In order to help such people cope better with this situation, physicians and scientists at Charité’s Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences have worked closely with patients to develop the Recovery Cat app, which is designed to aid patients, psychotherapists and psychiatrists in treating and managing these illnesses. Since 2020, the team has been funded, mentored and supported as part of the BIH Digital Health Accelerator program at Charité BIH Innovation, the joint technology transfer unit of Charité and BIH.
In January 2025, Recovery Cat GmbH, which was spun off in 2022, entered into a cooperation with TK, Germany’s largest health insurance company, through a selective contract. This enables therapists and physicians to integrate the app into day-to-day care and collaboratively involve patients in the therapy process.
“With our digital platform, we want to give patients more control and autonomy in dealing with their illness while supporting them in planning and evaluating the therapy process together with therapists and doctors. The collaboration with Techniker Krankenkasse brings us an important step closer to achieving these objectives,” says Dr. Jakob Kaminski, managing director and co-founder of Recovery Cat GmbH.

Medical translation for the benefit of patients
“The BIH has set itself the goal of making a real impact on patients and communities. The BIH Digital Health Accelerator is one of our most successful programs for promoting effective innovations and marketable start-ups” says Prof. Christopher Baum, Chair of the BIH Board of Directors and Chief Translational Research Officer of Charité. “The cooperation with Techniker Krankenkasse is a great and very tangible example of how quickly the active promotion of medical translation can generate a broad range of practical applications. I am very pleased that a great many patients will now be able to use Recovery Cat, from which they will hopefully reap substantial health benefits.”
“Digital solutions for people with severe mental illnesses are rare. Recovery Cat fills a gap here,” says Klaus Rupp, head of care management at Techniker Krankenkasse (TK). “Our special care contract gives our insurees access to this innovative digital service.”
What can Recovery Cat do?
The aim of Recovery Cat is to improve self-management by providing patients with a digital tool for symptom monitoring. The app, which is certified as a medical device, offers the option of doing a daily check-in. Patients can record their symptoms, side effects, resources and early warning signs and receive visualizations for analysis purposes. These provide a precise overview of the course of the illness. Using this information, the app alerts the patients to changes and helps them evaluate symptoms and activate their individual resources.
At the same time, a separate interface allows doctors and therapists to set up and customize the tool together with patients. So the app not only ensures transparent and easily understandable therapy planning, but also assists patients and practitioners in performing crisis management – thus enabling them to respond swiftly to any changes during therapy.
Recovery Cat is supported by the Impact Funds of the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB), which are provided in partnership with private investors.