Whether you’re going through a personal challenge or seeking to manage your mental health long-term, therapy is an excellent help. Sadly, there are many hurdles when setting up in-person treatment. Everything from how high the price of medicine can be in the States (even a therapist with a sliding fee scale) to the substantial possibility that the therapist you visit isn’t all that good of a match. Ultimately, it’s not that straightforward to make it work.
Talkspace, an online therapy, offers “asynchronous” text chat between a licensed psychiatrist. You might’ve noticed before, but maybe you’ve thought that texting would never be as good a replacement as the real deal.
It is a digital health company seeking to transform how people obtain therapy. They’ve now chosen their first head chief medical officer, Neil Leibowitz. Neil is entering the position after leaving UnitedHealth Group in New York. There he worked as senior behavioral health director.
They are an online therapy provider, allowing people to access therapy through the web or mobile apps. Taking a divergence from traditional in-person therapy sessions, users can communicate through text messages, video chats, or over the phone. Leibowitz realized that many therapists favor conventional therapy programs, as she was in an interview on the phone. However, the patient-centric strategy of a model like this shows how people can speak with a clinician if they ever feel like they need it, and if it’s a transfer of text messages, they can look back at earlier statements.
What’s fascinating about the decision to hire Leibowitz is that the organization represented him in correspondence as someone skeptical of Internet therapy. He didn’t agree with those perspectives and said he hadn’t completely understood them.
Leibowitz stated that he would further the company in the new position, and it’s the drive to extend into psychiatry by this year’s end. To do so would mean implementing a process for clients to be evaluated for individual prescriptions. It isn’t easy to see how the development would proceed without insurance corporations noticing and doing something about it. But the plan can still significantly grow the company’s clientele base.
Only Magellan currently affords Talkspace support compensation using its Employee Assistance Program. In the future, Leibowitz said that, looking forward, he would further want Talkspace to cooperate with central care systems. This links to a greater drive by many health tech organizations. Congress members understand how crucial it is for specific psychiatric knowledge, like having a history of drug abuse, to be combined into computerized health reports so therapists can choose a more intelligent treatment approach. For example, if they identified the patient was an addict or someone suffering from depression, they may medicate them with differing prescriptions.
