Foresight Mental Health

Berkeley Counselling and Psychological Services facing capacity constraints

Mental health treatment costs out of pocket between $500 to $1000 an hour

Can wait up to three months to receive treatment

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Foresight founders wanted to use software to improve clinical decisions in mental health

One of the first attempts was to build database of the genetic profile of patients to aid diagnosis

Understanding how genetic sequences within different patients interacted with medication creates pharmacogenetic insights which leads to more accurate dosage prescribed

Medical prescription in mental health is often iterative. Time is wasted if first drug prescription has low efficacy

Improving diagnostic accuracy reduces repeat visits and shortens overall wait time

It also reduces adverse drug reactions, which according the FDA is a pretty big cause of death. It's killing about 100,000 people a year and causing 2 million hospitalizations

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So if you're prescribing for depression, as a psychiatrist, you have about 30 different options to pick from. It's very difficult to choose.

Our software got to the point where about I think 30 to 50 psychiatrists using it.

But the monetization was pretty difficult, because our product was classified as genetic testing when it came to insurer reimbursements, which was pretty hit or miss

In total we interviewed 100 different psychiatrists and got a feel for the industry. Almost none of them took insurance.

In the US, 60% are private practice that don't take insurance. Out of which 55% are solo. They suffer from care coordination problems, generally expensive, but they can get away with it since the demand is so much. They are often low tech too without even a computer in office

Worked directly with university campuses

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Psychiatrists have three paths usually. First, they can go private, second, they can work at clinics, or third they can work for foresight

In private practice, you have to manage billing, insurance, marketing, lease, patient scheduling, and a whole lot of admin. Providers might not want to do that

For clinics, the future is fairly bleak compared to what we are able to provide

We have a precision medicine platform that helps you get better at your job.

//clinical decision support tools aka precision medicine

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Our secret sauce is using data to improve diagnostic accuracy and select optimal treatment, ranging from drugs, exercise, mindfulness, sleep, supplements, etc

we are fortunate to have our psychiatric professionals generating data for us, which is helpful to train our algorithm, while we help them

another advantage is we design our own electronic health records, which means our data is highly structured when it comes in

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For healthcare in US, it's all insurance driven. For our visits to be really affordable, we need to partner with insurers. Most patients don't pay anything to come into Foresight, ranging from 0 to 15 per visit

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We opened our first clinic using our first round of funding that we raised using the software model. Then We essentially told our current investors that model wasn't working and we're gonna pivot. they told us we were crazy.

But we did and we're very successful. And the recent round, we closed our seed round of about 1.3 million that enabled us to set up the next six clinics.

We're quite different from deep tech or med tech or digital health companies, in that we are generating revenue and cashflow already

We fall under the jurisdiction of clinical decision support software FDA guidelines

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One of the skills I had to quickly learn was sales and negotiation. Every insurer will negotiate rates that they pay you. And those rates are what you live basically operate with. So those are pretty important to set the price point, right.

We don't have the luxury of setting how much we want consumers to pay us. it's driven by insurance.

Every insurance company has a provider network that you refers its patients to. A provider would be happy to join an insurer's network, because there's a lot less administrative overhead where they only have to manage one point of contact versus 100.

Luckily, we had been able to convince quite a few insurers thanks to our high volume of past cases where we demonstrate better health outcomes for our patients in real world outcomes, as opposed to clinical trials