First week on this and thought it’ll be worthwhile to write a ‘lay of the land’ post, talking a little about the intersection of tech and mental healthcare.
Looking at the numbers, it’s crazy how far we’ve come in the past decade. We’re seeing an incredible rise in venture funding for digital health companies, built by technologists AND professionals who are fueled by a desire to “fix healthcare”.
*Graph lifted from Rock Health’s report
I like to joke that this infusion of $$ is because the VCs are getting older and are starting to breakdown in body and spirit. Regardless of the why, the end result is amazing — more and more work is being done to fix our current healthcare system. And as an incredible side effect, this infusion of dollars into healthcare also means an infusion of dollars to companies in mental health.
On the consumer side, we’re seeing a wave of societal acceptance towards the concept of ‘mental wellness’, mirrored by the rise of meditation, mindfulness, and brands + products targeted towards emotional stability. It’s not a table-side conversation yet, but it’s a topic that is no longer taboo to broach or talk about.
My theory is that a lot of this is due to the anonymity of the interwebs, where the ability to share private stories allows us to realize that hey! We’re. All. Going. Through. Shit. And hey! Seeking help for our mental wellbeing isn’t that weird after all.
Demand for mental health resources is exploding. And as an industry, mental health professionals are scrambling to find solutions for this influx of demand.
So what is the industry doing?
Huge caveat: we’re still pioneering the intersection of mental health and technology.
We’re figuring out how best to integrate all these fancy new things into an old, complex system, and literature about tech-enabled treatments are only starting to catch up. It’s exciting but it’s also cautious work — unlike your typical industry disruption, moving fast and breaking things is far from what we strive for. It’s more of a, move like people’s lives depend on it (because they do). Most “leaders” of the mental health tech space are less than a decade old, most have been around for less than 5 years.
I like to separate current companies in mental health into two broad buckets: companies that focus on improving access to care, and companies that focus on building behavioral care platforms.
Improving Access to Care
This largely encompasses B2C products / services that try to make it easier for a consumer to access mental healthcare. They may differ in their approaches, but the general bet is that creating alternative or better systems is the way to drive greater access to mental healthcare.
We can distill this down into 4 main categories:
Tele / chat -therapy: Improving immediacy and reach of existing therapists
e.g. Talkspace, Betterhelp, Simple Practice TelehealthRepurposing the therapy experience
For consumers: Two Chairs, Octave, Headway
For therapists: Simple Practice, TherapyNotesToolifying techniques therapists use
e.g. Woebot, Quirk & other CBT apps, mood trackers/journalsTherapy Alternatives
e.g. 7 Cups, Calm, Headspace, Crisis Text Hotline
Behavioral Health Platforms*
(Behavioral health describes the connection between behavior and the wellbeing of the body/mind. It’s commonly used interchangeably with mental health, but behavioral health is more of a blanket term.)
This bucket is more interesting to me. Companies here are driving a more integrated approach, working with existing players in the space (employers, providers and payers) to create a model for behavioral healthcare. Since all these players are so integrated with each other, this approach is more effective in creating systemic change in how we approach mental health.
Leaders here include: Ginger, Lyra Health, Quartet Health, Modern Health, Meru Health, among many. Each company varies in strategy, but the main message is clear — it is cost effective to treat behavioral health as a first class citizen, and therefore, we should make it a priority.
Great, so which bucket is Heard in?
Ya’ll are here because you want to follow Heard’s journey. We started as a platform for therapists to pick clients, and to this day, we’ve helped our network of therapists grow their practice with 36 (and counting) new users. To us, this was a way for us to learn quickly and get our hands dirty.
The therapist to client matching is a symptomatic of a deeper issue — a mismanagement of supply. And as we learn more about this problem, we’re aiming high and building a world where that is no longer the case.
So I would probably put us in the ‘behavioral health platform’ bucket, because in some sense, we’re building a platform for behavioral health. But we’re focused on growing and serving the people who do the actual work — therapists. More on that later.
With love,
Vic