Talkspace Inc. (Nasdaq: TALK) on Thursday revealed its new B2B behavioral health product, dubbed Talkspace Engage. This comes as the company doubles down on its enterprise business.
Talkspace Engage consolidates the company’s mental health and wellness content into a so-called “one-click” system that helps human resources and similar managers drive employee engagement with those resources, Erin Boyd, Talkspace’s chief growth officer of enterprise, told Behavioral Health Business.
The move demonstrates Talkspace’s push into content as a service that doesn’t directly involve telehealth from its virtual mental health practice. Talkspace joins a long list of digital behavioral health companies looking to streamline services to win over B2B clients.
“Our number one goal when creating this product is to deliver on our mission to provide high-quality mental health services for all, and the more we can work with employers and payers, the more we open up access for all,” Boyd said.
The announcement comes after Talkspace released a self-guided mental health and wellness mobile app in April 2022. In March 2022, it also released a self-guided app for parenting called Lasting from Talkspace.
Talkspace Engage brings engagement and benefit promotion of these services as well as the Talkspace clinical offering, as a benefit or through an employee assistance program, into one portal. The new service also includes a year-long engagement plan and real-time reporting tools, Boyd said.
Founded in 2012, the company got its start as an asynchronous therapy app that, until its life as a public company, was focused on a direct-to-consumer model. The company’s finances were worse than expected on the public markets, resulting in the termination of its founding CEO Oren Frank and its co-founder and Clinical Lead Roni Frank in November 2021. Since then, it’s sought to shift into a B2B model focused on large employers and payers.
“On the [B2B] side, we are also making changes to our product to enable HR executives to better optimize their entire behavioral healthcare spend,” Talkspace Chairman Doug Braunstein said in the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “External research continues to suggest that behavioral health care needs for employees continues to be a top priority for HR executives.”
Jon Cohen, the CEO of Talkspace, said at the 2023 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January that the company’s previous troubles with customer acquisition costs are over given the significance of its shift into B2B services.
“It’s irrelevant to where we’re going in our business,” Cohen said. “That’s done. It’s gone.”
On the payer side, the explosion of startups in the already saturated B2B wellness and mental health ecosystem overwhelms key decision makers, according to top payer and behavioral health executives.
Boyd confirmed that employers Talkspace engages with express similar concerns.
After the release of the Talkspace Self-Guided product, the company’s internal research found that 50% of employees only wanted a self-guided project. However, the company found that managers didn’t know how to get employees to use the mental health and wellness benefits, didn’t feel comfortable communicating use of the benefits, didn’t understand potential ROI and didn’t have the time to track and promote benefits.
“What [Talkspace Engage] does is really aids an HR team’s ability to walk the walk when it comes to helping their employees with their mental wellness,” Boyd said.
Combined, Talkspace says it covers 86 million lives, according to the release.
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