The digital health startup Meomind Inc. wants to help workers and employers circumvent the mental health clinician shortage problem.
Meomind, based in Pacifica, California, announced it exited stealth mode Thursday. The app gives users instant access to effective mental health care, CEO Sushant Gupta told Behavioral Health Business.
Users tell the app about their mental health. Then, the app generates personalized selections of 10- to 20-minute pre-recorded therapy sessions for the user to view.
The app uses machine learning to identify which of the roughly 200 pre-recorded therapy sessions users should engage with. The sessions are based on cognitive behavioral, dialectical behavioral or evidence-based therapies.
Employers pay a per-member-per-month fee or subscription model based on employee usage. Then, employees have full access to the app. Anyone may access a basic version of the app via app stores.
Meomind sells to employers, insurance companies, governments and educational institutions.
What problem is Meomind trying to solve?
Meomind’s goal, Gupta said, is to give people timely access to mental health care through their relevant organization.
Accessing care is one of the biggest and most intractable problems in behavioral health.
Pre-pandemic, it could take weeks to get an initial outpatient mental health appointment. But since its onset, the demand for mental health services has boomed. But the persistent mental health clinician shortage chokes the supply of mental health services.
This has led to long wait times for behavioral health services. Some estimates on average wait times range from 48 days to as high as 10 weeks.
“The biggest pain point that we wanted to address is the average waiting time to see a therapist,” Gupta said. He places average U.S. wait times at about 21 days. “For our app, [the wait time] is zero seconds. You can tell us your problems and we will recommend sessions that actually help address your problems and immediately start getting help through a real therapist.”
Using Meomind to access “vicarious therapy” is the difference “between no therapy and getting therapy,” Gupta said.
“There are not a lot of solutions that are able to address that core issue, which is that we have an acute shortage of therapists in the U.S.,” Gupta said.
He added that several companies make it easier for people to access the country’s mental health clinicians. But this doesn’t necessarily address the shortage.
Getting started
Gupta launched Meomind and raised its seed round with Anni Kelley-Day and Makan Amini in December 2021. Kelley-Day is a cognitive behavioral therapist who also holds the title of clinical lead with Meomind.
Gupta was previously the director of strategy and business transformation at OptumHealth. Amini was previously a senior product manager at Homebase.
Meomind raised $1 million from Fusion Fund and Artis Venture, as well as angel investors.
“All of us in the co-founding team have a very close relationship, and frustration I would say, with how [mental health] is today,” Amini told BHB in an interview.
Amini and Gupta said they have a personal connection to their work. Amini struggled with social anxiety as a teenager growing up in Sweden. Gupta was diagnosed with clinical depression. Despite having what they thought was good access, both struggled to connect with the system. This was especially true with finding specialists.
“I saw firsthand how powerful therapy can be, but also how big the differences between a therapist that actually specializes in social anxiety [is] versus one that does not,” Amini said.
Meomind seeks out leading therapists to include in its library. It records real therapists conducting sessions with actors or with former patients. Only 5% and 10% of all the clinicians that start the process of working wth Meomind end up in the library.
Dr. Bruce Wampold and Dr. John Norcross act as clinical advisors to Meomind. Wampold is a psychotherapy researcher with over 50,000 citations. Norcross is the former president of the psychotherapy division at the American Psychological Association.
Wampold and Norcross helped Meomind find high-quality clinicians. They also guide the company’s clinical quality efforts.
The big bet
Meomind breaks from the B2B mental health startups pack in a key way. It doesn’t directly facilitate therapy. It also takes a notably unfamiliar tack from its other B2B peers.
Most startups usually build tech tools and garner huge rosters of telehealth therapists. Some have reached unicorn status by doing just that. Think Lyra Health, Headspace Health and Spring Health. Still, the heavy reliance on contract therapists in this approach is not without controversy.
Early on, Gupta said that Meomind said the founders considered many different modes of treatment. They picked the “vicarious therapy” or asynchronous approach based on data.
And it’s through outcomes that Meomind plans to win over employers and users alike.
About 85% of users “feel better” after listening in on a session, Gupta said. The users report feeling less alone seeing others with similar struggles. Others gain a better understanding of effective therapy.
Meomind also tracks efficacy through well-known standardized assessments. Users complete GAD-7s and PHQ-9s, measures for anxiety and depression, in the app.
About 45% of users report both these scores decrease when they use the app. Gupta benchmarks in-person therapy as seeing 50% reductions and mental health apps see 21% reductions in scores.
He also said the engagement of Wampold and Norcross lends gravitas to their approach.
Still, Gupta realizes that Meomind faces the hurdle of proving out its approach.
“There is a lot of reason to believe that this is clinically effective,” Gupta said. “One challenge we have in front of us is that nobody has done this before. So you have to create the evidence as you can imagine.”
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