regarding 7.7 million adults have a co-occurring substance use disorder and mental health condition, but more than half receive no treatment. A new digital health partnership is launching to support this population.
Telemental Health Provider Space for conversations merges with Bike healthopiate use disorder virtual provider the companies announced Tuesday. New York-based Talkspace offers therapy, psychiatry and medication management. He treats patients with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and other conditions. Bicycle Health, based in Boston, offers addiction treatment medications, therapy and peer support groups.
Through the partnership, Talkspace clinicians can refer patients with opioid use disorder to Bicycle Health for its addiction services, while Bicycle Health can refer patients to Talkspace for treatment of co-occurring mental illnesses. In addition to treating their own mental health, these patients can also receive marriage and family therapy at Talkspace.
“Opioid use disorder is often a co-morbid condition with mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression and other behavioral health conditions,” said Ankit Gupta, CEO of Bicycle Health, in an interview. “We want to provide our patients with a comprehensive model of care. While we have a robust national team of medication providers to manage, I think access to behavioral health is so challenging that we’re really excited to provide behavioral health care through the partnership with Talkspace, where we’re able to address both the disorder, related to both opiate use and co-occurring psychiatric conditions that our patients have.’
The companies chose each other as partners because both have significant reach and work with payers. Bicycle Health has treated more than 33,000 patients in 32 states, and Talkspace has 130 million covered lives in all 50 states.
“We wanted to ensure that we were running an evidence-based program, and we were specifically looking for a partner that focused on third-party payer relationships like we do,” said Natalie Cummins, chief business officer of Talkspace, in an interview. “Bicycle also works primarily with payers and really focuses on that evidence-based approach combined with that payer coverage. Between Bicycle and Talkspace it was a really good match.”
There is no shared income in the partnership. Rather, each company charges separately for its services.
Talkspace and Bicycle Health’s collaboration comes at a time when more digital health companies are teaming up to expand the support they can provide to patients. Talkspace also recently partners with Evernow to support women during perimenopause and menopause. Virtual psychiatric company Talkiatry recently announced collaboration with NOCD, a virtual provider for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Vori Health, a company that treats musculoskeletal pain, announced partnering in September with Ophelia, a virtual opiate use disorder provider.
Partnering with other healthcare players is important to improve coordination of patient care, Gupta said.
“Telehealth and virtual care were created in silos. … The more we can provide holistic care that really helps the patient throughout their care journey, the more we can integrate across systems, the more we can collaborate and share data and information, the better we’re going to be,” he said.
Cummins echoed Gupta’s comments, saying Talkspace is exploring additional partnerships in the future to support whole-person care.
Photo: metamorworks, Getty Images
