Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Serial Entrepreneur Tackling Mental Health, A Conversation with Mark Frank, CEO and Co-founder at SonderMind
54 Plays9 months ago
In this episode, Mark Frank, CEO and Co-founder of SonderMind, joins Frederic Laurier, Managing Director at Alantra, to dive into the complexities of the mental health industry. The episode sheds light on SonderMind’s innovative approach of enhancing therapist efficiency and explores how Mark’s diverse background and personal journey have significantly influenced the development of SonderMind. Additionally, the dialogue encompasses the various technological and regulatory hurdles that are currently confronting the mental health sector, emphasizing the necessity for strategic solutions.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Crossroads and Digital Health
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to another digital health episode of Crossroads by Elantra, where we explore industry themes that are at the center of some of the most important changes in today's healthcare landscape.
Journey of Mark Frank in Virtual Mental Health
00:00:16
Speaker
In this session, the CEO of Sounder Mind, Mark Frank, shares some of his learnings, heading one of the virtual mental health counseling pioneers.
00:00:25
Speaker
From his personal experience that led him to the founding of Sounder Mine, to how clinical information is making therapy more efficient, Mark will address various technological and regulatory challenges that the mental health industry is facing and needs to tackle. We hope you enjoyed the interview as much as we did.
Mark Frank's Career and Founding Sounder Mind
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome all to another episode of Crossroads by Elantra. In today's episode, we have the pleasure of hosting Mark Frank, the CEO of Sounder Mind. Mark will share his insights and perspective on the mental health landscape. How Sounder Mind makes therapists more efficient and how his previous professional and personal experiences have helped them shape Sounder Mind in what it is today. Mark, it's a pleasure to have you on our podcast.
00:01:05
Speaker
Thanks for helping me out. For the benefit of our listeners, would you mind sharing a quick summary of your professional journey up to the founding of Sundermind? If I may say so, it's a very diverse background. Yeah, thanks. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I've been accused of that. It is a good thing. Professional ADD, which is not a clinical diagnosis, you should be aware. My career started actually in the army, so a little untraditional for most folks here in the United States.
00:01:32
Speaker
After undergrad, I went to West Point and I served in the Army for five years and ultimately did the whole business school route, actually ended up in investment banking, doing healthcare, mergers and acquisitions for a couple of years. And then I started my first company, which was a healthcare services
Challenges in Mental Health Care
00:01:49
Speaker
company. So basically a management service organization helping to treat patients who had lung cancer, prostate cancer with a relatively novel therapy at the time, which was CyberKnife. So I grew that, ultimately sold it.
00:02:02
Speaker
had an outside investor, started a couple other companies, one in healthcare that was a software platform, restoring and sharing and healing medical imaging data. Did that bootstrap that didn't have any outside capital with my two co-founders. We got that to cashflow positive and sold that. And then a third company that I was not the primary founder, but I was one of the co-founders and COO CFO, which was
00:02:24
Speaker
a software platform for providing leads and data to sales teams, particularly in the commercial real estate and the telecom space. And it's all that sort of bundled together in concert with my own experience of trying to engage in therapy. And I can talk about the founding story, but I have been really in and around healthcare in my professional journey since my time in the army.
00:02:49
Speaker
Yeah, this would be the right time I think if you could just delve a bit more into how the company came about.
Sounder Mind's Approach to Therapy
00:02:54
Speaker
As I mentioned, I was operating in health care. I have three wonderful children now, two of whom are teenagers and one that's going to be a teenager in a few months here. And so I had three kids in three and a half years. My partner and I, we were struggling, right? That was a very stressful time in our lives. And I was looking for a therapist.
00:03:15
Speaker
And I knew healthcare, right? I knew the Parity Act had been passed. This was a circa 2012, a Parity Act being the congressional act that basically made it illegal for insurers to actually limit mental health benefits any more than they would limit physical health benefits. So it brought at par mental health benefits and physical health benefits. But it took a long time for that actually to flow through the system as we've seen in healthcare. So I knew that was in place that was operating out of your company.
00:03:43
Speaker
I just took forever to try to find the right therapist who took my insurance, who was a good fit clinically for me, who was geographically proximate and had to schedule availability. I went through that journey. It was extremely difficult. And I kept thinking to myself, gosh, why is this so, there's so many therapists out there.
00:04:00
Speaker
Many of them are saying I need more clients or patients. And unlike in other parts of healthcare where there might be only one or two neurosurgeons in your market or a couple oncologists or whatever, it was like, gosh, there's so many. Why is this so difficult? Moreover, the whole path of trying to find somebody who took your insurance seemed kind of bonkers to me given that the law had been passed.
00:04:20
Speaker
That was one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is my younger sister as herself, a therapist. So I'd seen her journey and all the struggles she went through. And actually what I identified was a lot of the challenges that I was facing as a patient, as a client, trying to engage in care.
00:04:38
Speaker
We're sort of like the opposite of the challenges she was facing. She was like, yeah, it's really difficult to run my practice and I can't find enough clients. I don't know how to deal with the insurance and that's why I don't really want to take it and this, that and the other. And I'm like, okay, well, the solution here is now seems relatively apparent.
00:04:52
Speaker
That was really what started the path for Sonnermind. I founded it with my co-founder, Sean Boyd, himself a therapist and president of the Colorado Counseling Association. That was in 2014. We created two companies out of that in 2017. He runs the other company, which is a real estate focused company. And Sonnermind is really the platform and the provider organization that is meant to deliver the highest quality care for clients by enabling our providers to focus on what they do best
00:05:20
Speaker
which is get people better we take care of the rest right we really try to focus on our key provider value proposition of ensuring that they have enough clients in their practice for what they're looking for one that they're paid competitively two and three that they don't worry about all the other stuff.
00:05:38
Speaker
Whether it be the clinical means delivered via technology, things like that, or the administrative burden of running the practice under our umbrella. So you really saw the two sides of the coin, right? From the provider side and the patient side. Very interesting. Exactly. I don't want to put you in a corner and have you bat and mouth your competitors, but could you quickly touch on how maybe you differentiate like the talk spaces, the lira or the springs of this world?
00:06:03
Speaker
We're not in like one specific box. First, we're a healthcare provider. We're not like a network, we're not a TPA, we're not a pass-through marketplace. Two, we provide and always have provided virtual care as well as in-person care. So we believe that what's important is having the ability to deliver high quality care to individuals by making it much easier and less burdensome for the clinicians. As you think about some of those competitors that you mentioned,
00:06:34
Speaker
They're sort of like tangential competitors. Let's take a couple, Lira, spray, et cetera. They're very clearly going directly to the employer. And I think that's an appropriate path and it's clearly a very successful business strategy. From my point of view, it always struck me that it was interesting that we had carved out, and I understand why prior to 2010,
00:06:56
Speaker
why we had carved out mental health benefits from the rest of the health care benefits, which are just delivered through your plan. The insurance plan says, I'm not going to get a special thing for the oncology benefit, another thing for the OB benefit. They're not going to get like 800 different benefits. I actually think that helped create some of the challenges that we're now facing today and have been facing for the past 15 years as an industry, as a society, in terms of access to care. What I mean by that is that
00:07:24
Speaker
When we separate out the way of normally accessing mental health care, it creates incentives that are misaligned. We have enough misaligned incentives in healthcare as it is, so this seemingly creates another one. So we're very clearly not going directly to employers at this moment.
00:07:39
Speaker
And then the other was, as I mentioned, we've always offered this duality of we have asynchronous care via text and in-app messaging. We have obviously virtual care via video. We have in-person care. So that's one of the clear differences. And I think the third is that we really focus on ensuring that our providers can actually up level and deliver higher quality clinical care.
00:08:03
Speaker
So we really have focused very discreetly on being the highest quality clinical provider out there. And the way we do that is by collecting and providing an immense amount of data. So you're within healthcare, so you understand this. I expect a lot of the audience does.
00:08:17
Speaker
We really embrace measurement-based care techniques and have worked all of that into our entire software platform so that a therapist on our platform, when they're seeing a sounder mind client, they have an immense amount of data about that individual before they take them for the first session on an ongoing basis. And that's powered by our technology and we're even powering it further as we start to
00:08:38
Speaker
use co-pilot AI type tools to start to look through the data that our providers have on their clients and that they can make it easier for them to deliver better care when they're in session. From both the provider and the patient perspective, in-person versus virtual, are you seeing a big difference in outcomes, in preferences? Are you tracking that? Yes. We're tracking preferences as well as outcomes. Not a huge difference in outcomes at this moment,
00:09:06
Speaker
It might be because the data is still very skewed. So we're still in the mode post COVID of the vast majority of care is being delivered in a virtual setting over video. But what we've started to see, and we've been seeing this now for about 12, 18 months, is a shift in the preference from the client, from the individual consumer or the patient, actually do more in-person care. And what I find to be really interesting
00:09:34
Speaker
was that prior to 2020, we actually did 100% in-person care prior to March of 2020. And we were building our technology piece and we were actually planning to launch our video platform a little bit later than we did. We were going to launch it in May of 2020, business and world circumstances sort of forced us to go, let's pull up that roadmap a little bit earlier. So we were able to get it out by the middle of March of 2020.
00:09:57
Speaker
such that 100% February was in person, 98% or 96% was delivered via video in April of 2020.
Tech and Hybrid Therapy Models
00:10:06
Speaker
But what we're seeing now is it's about a 20 video to in person. But the challenge and what I thought was interesting, what I was mentioning was that we actually really had to convince therapists initially to say, do these not in person. And the feedback was typically,
00:10:23
Speaker
I'm really a lot better. I enjoy the interaction. I think that I can actually read people and I can sort of guide to the right outcome more easily. And the demand for video was really coming from the consumer, from the individual client. And we're seeing that sort of flip-flop now, where more providers are going, you know what, like that extra cost of getting an office space or going in person, it's like, I like being able to do this from my home or whatever. And the individual consumer or the client's going, you know what, I kind of want to go back into that safe space.
00:10:52
Speaker
that is the therapy room and have that human connection. And so what I think is going to happen is that we're going to get to an equilibrium where it's not, and this has always been our position, this is not either or. It's not like you do all in-person or do all video. It's just like the way we have sort of settled into our environment from an employee standpoint, which is we operate in a hybrid
00:11:12
Speaker
setting. We'll do in-person meetings, we'll do video meetings, it'll be dependent on the situation, it'll be dependent on the topic, it'll be dependent on who we're trying to engage with. I think therapy is going to continue to move in that direction where it's this blend. Technology can go so far, but can you maybe provide some details on what you offer your therapist in terms of technology, how that has enhanced their practice? It's really a full suite for the provider. We have a full EHR platform
00:11:42
Speaker
the practice management sort of capabilities, so that would be scheduling. People can direct schedule. Providers can have their own provider links as an example and say, hey client, come on and just schedule directly with me. The video capabilities, the secure messaging, all those sort of tactical points of course billing. And then clinical notes, a lot of those are AI assisted. So we have clinical notes capabilities. We have the ability for providers to actually seek outside
00:12:02
Speaker
that includes everything from
00:12:12
Speaker
Input so meaning from weather tomorrow for providers and clinical support team quality team as well as to make referrals say hey, this client needs a psychiatrist i'm gonna connect them with son of my psychiatrist so all of that is gonna built into one system and is our technology stack in our home grown system.
00:12:32
Speaker
And then we couple that with an offering for the individual client or the consumer. So again, all the things that would sort of enable that administrative piece, right? The messaging has to be two-way, the video has to be two-way, the scheduling has to be two-way, we have to collect billing information, et cetera, et cetera. All of that is obviously part and parcel to kind of the components that are necessary for delivering it on the provider side.
00:12:53
Speaker
But in addition to that, we, both through acquisition as well as through our own build, have built out a full suite of tools of self-care and clinical tools for the individual client or the consumer to use. So that includes things like meditation, cognitive therapy, something called neurotunes, which helps with sleep.
00:13:13
Speaker
journaling all of these components, so as you start to pull that in, and then all the traditional depression, anxiety, postpartum, trauma, scoring, and assessment tools, and we use that both to deliver to the provider, so here's how your client's doing on a longitudinal basis, as well as to look at holistically and say, okay, which providers have the highest aptitude for certain clients and certain diagnoses, and let's make sure that we're getting those individuals to those providers who are best suited for their specific needs.
00:13:41
Speaker
So it really is this comprehensive system.
00:13:45
Speaker
meeting the need of the provider, meeting the need of the client. And as we do that, we think about the third constituent in our ecosystem is the insurance plan. We can now talk to the payers and say, we are definitively providing higher quality care. In many cases, we're getting people to much lower levels of depression, anxiety in a shorter period of time, meaning that there's less cost to the plan. And whether that be via the employer or if it's a full risk plan, all of that accrues benefit to the ecosystem.
AI and Data Security in Mental Health Care
00:14:12
Speaker
Have you done any exploration with regards to chatbots, asynchronous messaging? It sounds like you're using asynchronous messaging. What was the outcome of the pros and cons? Do you mean like AI assisted? Yes. Automated chatbots. We've not done that. We are exploring how can we marry the sort of delivery of care with the provider with some of these more advanced technical capabilities that we have now in our platform. We could sort of say, let's just do this chatbot and get it out there.
00:14:42
Speaker
where we struggle a little bit is where do you draw the line on what's clinically appropriate and what's delivering? These are people's lives we're talking about. We've not gone down that path yet. And I think if we do, I expect that it'll be a much closer marriage of
00:14:58
Speaker
hey, you have a therapist, and you've built up a good rapport, and the chatbot is gonna engage with you in a way that enables your therapist to best support you, as opposed to sort of trying to replace, I think we're still very far from that. At least from a clinical safety and efficacy standpoint, I think it's challenging. So maybe one more question, then we'll let you go. It's about data breaches.
00:15:23
Speaker
you probably have seen the news like everyone else right the recent seven million twenty three me customers are impacted by a recent breach. How do you ensure that you protect your patient's information it's extremely sensitive especially when we're talking about mental health information as one would imagine what safeguards are you putting in place.
00:15:44
Speaker
Very, very sensitive. So we're HIPAA compliant, obviously. We're a healthcare provider. One of the benefits of having built our own system is that we're not connecting with so many outside vendors and parties and saying, okay, this thing's going to go here and this thing's going to go there, which is often where reaches can happen. We're very close to achieving ISO certification, which as you well know, is the gold standard from a security standpoint.
00:16:07
Speaker
So we don't share client data for advertising purposes, anything like that. There's nothing that's going out. This is all the information we're using. The only time we've ever shared data with a third party is when we're working with the academic institutions where we're writing academic journal articles, not saying, here's a bunch of data set. It's actually just giving access to say, here's what we need to write these articles and let's anonymize and make sure that we're applying corporate economic protocols. I will note that
00:16:33
Speaker
I find it interesting, and I think for everybody listening to the pod, a lot of people would agree that the laws we have in this country, HIPAA laws, are, in my opinion, quite antiquated. It still shocks me that it's totally fine and acceptable to have a doctor's office fax my complete records. They could be like a hundred pages to another office, and it's just going to sit there.
00:16:59
Speaker
We've all been in enough offices where you can just go pick up the papers. That is not secure, period. And yet that is viewed as being totally HIPAA compliant. And yet the security that is in place with email systems or if you use confidential mode, that is not HIPAA compliant. It's one of these things like we got to bring the regulators up to the 21st century. We've solved this. I think that's one thing. And then the other is
00:17:26
Speaker
The data, I think it's just really interesting. I'm speaking for myself here, but I would say people are very willing to share information, whether it's in social media, whether it's the willingness from a populist standpoint to actually share information with third parties that is relatively private and sensitive information is one that astounds me, but it is a fact. There's a lot of information that we share all the time, location data, things like that, very sensitive.
00:17:53
Speaker
That information and the sharing information between medical providers, healthcare providers, is going to be the way that we can continue to improve upon the delivery of healthcare and reduce the cost. And more importantly, for mental health, the combination of all the stuff that's going on is quite important to understand what you're dealing with.
00:18:15
Speaker
everything from, hey, what's the weather today? And where are you? Where's your location? And how is that affecting your mood to what's going on in your job to what's your financial situation to all these different things, not to mention, of course, all the healthcare pieces of it is very important to understand what's going on for mental health point of view. You can almost have a full picture of someone you're absolutely right to. Without it, you're just shooting in the dark a little bit. It's different than physical health. Because if my arm hurts,
00:18:41
Speaker
Then if you start messing around my leg, I'm going to go, doctor, what are you doing? My leg doesn't hurt. Okay. And maybe there's a good reason to go, Hey, there's this thing here that's connected. Okay, cool. But the brain and our mental state is so complex and is so affected by these things that we aren't totally aware of that building this bigger picture. It will require us to ensure that we have fluidity of data, certainly across healthcare providers. And I think even across other aspects of sort of the human experience into some of this healthcare providers.
00:19:09
Speaker
I said that was the last question, so I lied one more and then it will let you go, but patient consent. The word on the street is FTC will start to regulate it in a different manner. It sounds like your mental health patients are willing to share their information with safeguards. What mechanism have you put in place with regards to patient consent and what impact do you feel the eventual FTC rulings may have?
00:19:34
Speaker
I would actually point this to our head of legal and say, hey, help me with this. But I know that we're not even going to come close to the line of the gray zone, meaning we're always going, if it needs to be done, we're going to follow the letter of the law to the T and then understand, okay, how has that changed? So for example, last year there were some changes from CMS in terms of what could and couldn't be
00:19:55
Speaker
used in an advertising standpoint. There were some fines that were levied against certain companies that were non-compliant, but it was a new law. We spent a lot of time and it cost money. I'd say one of these things is what's the aim that we're really trying to protect at sort of a macro level from a meta standpoint, I would want to understand.
00:20:11
Speaker
What are we really protecting here from a consumer point of view? And that's if I were a legislator, if I had the ability to be voting on these sorts of things or to be influencing that policy. But as an operator in the industry, we go, hey, we're going to always follow to the T exactly what's necessary to ensure that we're staying compliant.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
00:20:29
Speaker
And as there's changes, we have to react and we have to change what that means for, say, what we had to do last year with some of the changes on the advertising protocols.
00:20:37
Speaker
Mark, it was a great pleasure to have you on the podcast. For a long time, I wanted to do a deeper dive in this topic, and we cannot thank you enough for taking the time today. Thanks for having me on the show. It was really, really good to chat with you, and I look forward to getting any better. Likewise. Take care. Thank you for listening to another episode of Crossroads by Elantrum. We had meant to do one on mental health for a long time, and we're excited to have Mark on. If I had to pick the three key takeaways from you, we're out of inclusion of mental health. Other benefits has led to a spike in demand for mental health therapy.
00:21:07
Speaker
Initial reaction of payers that surge has been tried to tap into the larger therapist networks, which more often than not are attracting therapists with higher compensation. With costs spiraling out of control, payers and employers will most likely start focusing on outcomes more when selecting their partner networks. As such, they will start looking more closely at outcomes data that outfits like sound their mind track.
00:21:29
Speaker
The second one was the importance of making accessible as much clinical and social demographic data as possible therapists to enhance their efficacy or the efficacy of their therapy plans. Safeguards will however need to be put in place by the data custodians to avoid potential regulatory pitfalls.
00:21:45
Speaker
Lastly, technology may for the time being be best directed at reducing the administrative burden of clinicians while we await a more prevalent use of chatbots as a compliment and other replacement to them. If you'd like to learn more about digital health, please subscribe to this podcast and feel free to reach out. Take care.