alexalvarado

Thank you! We would love to work with CAPS departments. Out of curiosity, do you have any people you could introduce us to who might be able to tell us more about CAPS at specific schools?

Thanks so much for sharing your story. It is stories like yours that inspire us every day, and that will inspire more teens and parents to seek treatment. And I'm happy to hear that your treatment has put you in a better place, and you are headed off to RPI. To address your questions:

1) Crisis situations: safety is our #1 priority. We create a safety plan that includes coping skills, strengths, local resources and people to contact. If a crisis situation arises we have this in advance as a resource. We recognize online can create more challenges than in person for maintaining a safe environment, so we also refer patients who we believe might need more intensive care to in person treatment.

2) We firmly believe telehealth is a great vehicle for psychiatry. We haven't quite arrived there yet, but it is on our 'roadmap' to have psychiatrists. And in the meantime, we refer out for teens who need medication support.

Thanks again for sharing your story!

Definitely agree the rapport and 'alliance' between the two is paramount!

How it practically plays out: teen members can switch between counselors on our platform if they are not satisfied with their first match. If they don't find a match that is a fit within the first few sessions, we do offer a money back guarantee.

We do also focus in the upfront assessment on gathering the input we need from both the teen AND the parent to make the matches we select higher quality. This input includes goals, needs, specialty areas, interests and hobbies -- among other inputs.

Thank you both for the usability feedback, on both the performance and the UX side. We will absolutely take that into account in future iterations. And agree 100% with performance testing!

Thanks for the kind words about our mission! We aren't currently but that may change in the next 6 months. Can you shoot me a note alex at daybreakhealth dot com and I will connect you to our CTO?

Thanks for the kind words! We do believe designing for virtual first offers a lot of advantages vs. tacking it on to a traditional practice.

You ask a great question, and we'll add it to our FAQ. We currently refer out for the medication prescription needs, and are evaluating bringing the capability in-house.

Thank you for your great comment and for your important work at OkaySo.

We recognize that our current pricing, while an improvement over private practice, is still out-of-reach for much of the country. Our plan is to: 1) continue to evolve the product to reduce cost of care while maintaining quality, 2) pursue partnerships with health plans and eventually Medicaid (which covers the lowest income teens) so that our services can be offered for free to those teens. We are very open to other funding models to increase the access of our services for teens as well! I'll reach out to learn more

Thank you for the great question about access: access and quality are our twin aims when it comes to delivering mental health support to teens. The product is in service to those aims.

So to answer your question: our current product reflects what we think is the best solution to increase access to therapy while maintaining quality. Over time, as we learn more, the product could evolve to become even more accessible (e.g., more digital) if we are able to maintain quality with that solution.

One other piece I'll say on access: for a healthcare company the 'insurance plans' control the keys to access. From Day 1 an important part of our strategy is pursuing reimbursement so that the cost of our services reaches $0 for teens and families who need it and cannot afford the out-of-pocket cost. We are not there yet, but it is our goal!

Working with existing software systems make this compliance much easier. Many of the big name service providers (Twilio, Sendbird, Auth0, Heroku, AWS, etc) have out-of-the-box HIPAA compliancy. And working with an EMR is tablestakes for a healthcare provider, we definitely did not build that from the ground up! Our work is about bringing these solutions together into a unified UX and ensuring compliancy / security across the stack, while gradually introducing secure and compliant native functionality. Language itself does not have a huge impact (we've seen it done in many different languages), but having the right advisor can make the build process a lot easier if they know what to look for!

Thanks for the kind words.

On Pricing - our counselors are certified to practice and pass a rigorous interview process ensuring the highest quality. All are licensed to practice in California and have 5+ years experience working with adolescents. The primary differences are: 1) real estate (our therapists work from the comfort of their homes, so we don't have that cost), 2) cost of living (because we can work with therapists in varied geographies, their cost of living may be lower than in the highest demand/need geos), 3) value prop (adolescent-focused therapists want to work with us because of our flexibility and focus on teens which is rare to find)

On medication - today we refer out if patients need medication. It is an area we are actively thinking about how to better serve in house!