Handspring Health has secured US$19m in Series B funding to expand its virtual mental health clinic for children, young people and families.
The start-up, launched four years ago, plans to grow its clinician workforce, expand value-based care partnerships with insurers and enter more US states.
It will also develop services for patients with more complex needs and invest further in its technology platform.
Co-founders Sahil Choudhry and Kwasi Kyei previously worked in healthcare and venture capital, including at Cigna Ventures.
Choudhry said: “We’d seen the first wave of mental health companies and almost all of them were focused on getting people access to in-network therapists, but access is only half the story.
“The harder problem that we saw sitting on the payer side was quality, and our foundational insight that really got us started at Handspring was that well-meaning clinicians in the country rarely receive deep training in evidence-based care.”
Handspring treats children and teenagers aged eight to 17, along with young adults aged 18 to 26, for conditions including anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and trauma.
The care model also includes continuing training and support for parents, who are viewed as an essential part of the therapy process.
This includes behavioural parent training, which teaches parents techniques to manage their child’s behaviour and support their emotional development.
Handspring says its model starts with the clinician. Its therapists are employed rather than contracted and receive in-house training in evidence-based treatments.
These include cognitive behavioural therapy, which helps people change unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaviour, and dialectical behaviour therapy, which focuses on emotional regulation and coping skills.
Clinicians are also trained in exposure therapy, which gradually helps patients face thoughts or situations that cause fear or anxiety.
Choudhry said studies had indicated that many practising therapists do not consistently use or adhere to evidence-based care during their sessions.
He said: “There’s no standardisation certification or requirement to learn them. We know CBT works, but as a field we just don’t use it consistently.
“That’s the gap that became our thesis, which was if you could genuinely support clinicians in building a deep command of evidence-based care, you could create something rare, which is a model that’s win-win-win for families that actually get better while clinicians can grow and not burn out, but also payers can feel good about actually paying for the outcomes they’re paying for.”
Handspring provides continuing training, one-to-one clinical support and weekly consultation groups where clinicians discuss difficult cases with a supervisor.
Late last year, Handspring acquired mental health start-up Joon Care to expand its services and in-network insurance coverage in Washington State.
