The need for mental healthcare in the U.S. has never been more acute. This is why we are excited to announce our investment in UpLift, an integrated clinical delivery network built for measurement-based behavioral healthcare.
By Karen Page and Patrick Harmon.
The need for mental healthcare in the U.S. has never been more acute. This is why we are excited to announce our investment in UpLift, an integrated clinical delivery network built for measurement-based behavioral healthcare.
Just this past year, 20-25% of American adults reported experiencing some degree of mental illness and 16.4% of youth (age 12-17) reported suffering from at least one major depressive episode. While this trend had been developing steadily over the last several years, COVID served an accelerant: global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by a massive 25% between 2020-2022, and an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens now view mental health as a crisis.
However, while there is a general awareness of the problem, only 40% of those who need care receive it, often due to a combination of poor access, affordability, and quality of care. Patients that do seek care wait an average of 3.5 months before seeing a mental health practitioner and 70% must pay high cash rates for each visit. As a result, patients often either don’t seek care or turn to PCPs to meet their behavioral health needs, most of whom do not have the time, tools, training, or resources to adequately meet these needs. This limits tangible results for the patient and drives costs for health plans and payers, as patients with mental illness are 40% more expensive to cover.
The market clearly needs a full-stack behavioral health solution that addresses each of these challenges head-on.
The UpLift platform combines a therapy marketplace that accepts all major insurance carriers, a psychiatry offering to treat higher-cost and higher-acuity patients, and a collaborative care platform that allows behavioral healthcare providers to work with medical providers to treat the whole patient.
UpLift’s solution aligns incentives across all stakeholders, resulting in improved patient experience and clinical outcomes. Patients now receive treatment in 1-2 days and are only responsible for covering their copay. Healthcare providers can refer patients to UpLift’s provider network, monitor progress, and collaborate on patient care plans. Behavioral health providers have access to UpLift’s network of patients and suite of tools for delivering measurement-based care. Health plans and payers benefit from the improved network coverage, managed network services, and evidenced-based treatment driving improved quality of care and tangible ROI.
UpLift’s ambitious vision of becoming a full-stack platform for behavioral health impressed us from the very beginning. That said, we’ve been even more impressed with the team’s rapid execution on that vision over the past 18+ months. CEO Kyle Talcott is the type of mission-driven founder with deep industry expertise that we love to back, and he quickly surrounded himself with a world-class team, including Julian Cohen (former President of Behavioral Health at Teladoc), Clare Frye (former Director of Customer Care at Oscar), and Samer Absoulabi (former Group PM at Slice). The company has achieved best-in-class metrics in both growth and efficiency and recently began executing on their first enterprise contracts.
At B Capital, we seek to invest in dynamic founders solving the hardest problems in the biggest markets. UpLift is making significant strides in solving one of the most pressing problems facing our society today and we are excited to continue supporting the team in their journey.