GIMBHI's Q&A with Talkspace's Chief Growth Officer, Erin Boyd

Erin Boyd is Talkspace’s (TALK) Chief Growth Officer. With a 25-year track record of managing sales operations, business development, strategy and marketing, Erin is responsible for driving growth and delivering differentiated solutions and capabilities to Talkspace’s Enterprise customers. Prior to joining Talkspace, Boyd led Cigna’s behavioral network strategy, ensuring that customers had affordable, high-quality options when receiving behavioral health and substance abuse care. During her tenure at Cigna, she oversaw network programs and solutions that drove innovation, delivered cost-savings and improved outcomes to advance behavioral health access. Prior to Cigna, Boyd held a leadership position in business development and marketing for Aurora Behavioral Health System, a preeminent psychiatric hospital system.

What is Talkspace's strategy around prescribers?

We were founded in 2012 making therapy more convenient and accessible by pioneering the ability to text a licensed therapist from anywhere. Through the years we have matured into a leading comprehensive behavioral health provider, building on the core therapy offering  (for individuals, couples, and teens), and adding psychiatry and medication management, as well as self-guided tools and resources.

The strategy has been to provide comprehensive care and prescribe for common behavioral health conditions (though we made a deliberate decision not to prescribe controlled substances). Our prescribers, which are a portion of our 5,600+ provider network across all 50 states, can refer clients to therapy and vice versa. 

What is Talkspace's approach to building referral networks with primary care providers, pediatricians, health systems, and IOPs?

42% of adults with a diagnosable mental condition reported they were unable to receive necessary care because they could not afford it (Source: Mental Health America). Addressing cost barriers has been the basis of Talkpsace’s work since inception, but we have honed our efforts for the last few years on getting in-network with major health plans. Talkspace is now the top-most insurance covered virtual therapy provider. We also just recently announced we are accepting traditional Medicare in 11 states to start. 

This is also what drove us to launch the Behavioral Health Consortium - we are building out a cross-referral network of specialized and higher acuity digital care providers.

So far we have  Charlie Health, Ria Health, Bicycle Health, and an app that treats eating disorders. With this growing roster of evidenced-based solutions, we can offer our members access to clinically-vetted providers while maintaining our commitment to affordability and accessibility. 

One of the challenges we continue to face within our healthcare system is a lack of access to high quality behavioral care. Whether this is due to provider shortages (in highly populous states like NY, CA, Washington) or cost barriers, it has resulted in PCPs and pediatricians filling the void, which, without specialty, comes with risk of misdiagnoses or preemptively treating a condition with medication. As we know diagnosing a mental health disorder isn’t as simple as checking off a list of symptoms and making that determination and receiving an accurate diagnosis requires working with a licensed mental health professional to evaluate the frequency, intensity, severity and specificity of those symptoms, and understand them within the broader context of life events, stressors, and family history.

Simply put our aim is to make it as easy as possible for PCPs to refer their patients, whether they’re 13, 30 or 90. We have a landing page specifically dedicated to our physicians looking to refer patients to trusted virtual mental health care.

Does Talkspace have any plans to serve more acute populations that are in intensive outpatient programs (IOPs) and partial hospitalization programs (PHPs)?

We have not stated any concrete plans to provide this type of care, but possibly through partnerships. In fact, Charlie Health, which is part of our Behavioral Health Consortium provides virtual Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP), combine personalized care with peer connection, as part of their treatment plans.

Do any of Talkspace’s Medicare Advantage or Medicaid contracts have any VBC components?

We have some Medicare Advantage contracts on the horizon with VBC components. We do not have any Medicaid contracts at this time. 

What's Talkspace's priority of focus between employer, direct-to-consumer, and health plans?

We want to make high quality mental health care as accessible as possible, so all of those channels/business lines are important.

We do have 3 main channels as you have suggested: 1) Direct to Enterprise business, where we contract with the employer or organization (or municipality or school district like in the case of NYC and Baltimore County) to provide Talkspace free to their populations.  2) Health Plans/Payers, where we are serving a growing share of our audience who are paying for Talkspace with copay as part of their health plan and finally 3) our DTC business where clients can sign up for Talkspace and pay-out of-pocket through a monthly subscription of their choice.

As we have grown our in-network payer partnerships, now covering more than 140 million lives, it’s more often the case now that someone will come to Talkspace and realize they are covered under their insurance (since we have made it easy to verify your coverage instantaneously). Within the payer-driven business, a big priority is increasing the capture rate and driving continued utilization.

Contact me at shiv@gimbhi.com if you want work together on something!

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