Castell, Intermountain Health’s value-based care subsidiary, has announced a partnership with Headspace to expand its on-demand digital mental health offerings. The deal means that members in some Utah insurance plans will be able to access Headspace’s behavioral health coaching and therapy.
The organizations said the collaboration aims to address the growing mental health crisis by engaging patients wherever they may be on their mental healthcare journey.
Headspace’s website says it offers mindfulness tools for everyday life, including meditations, "sleepcasts," mindful movement and focus exercises. In 2021, Headspace merged with on-demand mental health company Ginger. Now its offerings include coaching, therapy, psychiatry and Employee Assistance Program services under one roof.
The partnership will integrate Headspace’s offerings into Castell’s value-based model of care, which aims to improve clinical outcomes at a population level while reducing costs across the healthcare continuum.
The partnership will allow Castell to refer eligible members directly to Headspace for behavioral health coaching and therapy. Those members will then have access to a team of behavioral health coaches, who respond to outreach in two minutes or less, Headspace says, and provide care in the moment of need. The company says its coaches help to build coping skills and manage day-to-day stressors, and its licensed therapists are trained in a variety of clinical specialties and treatment modalities for more acute clinical care. Headspace’s care model allows members to step up into higher levels of care or adjust down over time, as their needs and preferences evolve.
“Our goal with patients is to help them have the most holistic view of their health. Being able to better address and integrate a patient’s mental health status is critical to treating the whole person and elevating the quality of care they receive,” said Jay Zerwekh, CEO of Castell, in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Headspace to give patients access to behavioral health coaching and tools that can be tailored to meet their individual needs.”
Headspace says the impact of its evidence-based clinical care offerings include improvement in anxiety symptoms among nearly 60 percent of members and improvement in depression symptoms among nearly 70 percent of members.
Intermountain Healthcare formed Castell in 2019 to help disseminate some lessons the Utah-based integrated health system has learned in the shift to value-based care. Among other things, company offers digital tools to address virtual care, patient experience and social determinants of health. Castell, seeks to enable other organizations to accelerate their transition from volume to value-based systems of care, while keeping care more affordable and accessible, Intermountain said.
