How therapy apps work (and don’t work) with therapists
Canada’s wildfires + a sci-fi story told through Yelp reviews (Issue #347)
Therapy apps like BetterHelp, Headway, Alma, and Grow straddle the tech and healthcare industries and claim to simplify the process of finding an affordable, accessible therapist. Recently, therapist Melissa Flanagan, LCSW wrote from personal experience about the challenges that therapists face when using these apps — and how hard it can be to leave them.
I’ve always wondered why it’s so hard to find a therapist who takes insurance — I pay out of pocket each week, to the significant detriment of my savings account — but in reading Flanagan’s article, I learned how exhausting and convoluted it can be for private practitioners to navigate insurance claims. Working with Alma made things logistically easier as it assisted with those claims, streamlined the billing process, and even delivered higher reimbursement rates:
Depending on the state — I’m in New York — Alma and platforms like it have the bulk negotiating power to work with insurance plans to deliver reimbursement rates for therapists that can be 20%, 30%, or 35% higher than we can get with our individual contracts as independent providers. They negotiate as a “group practice,” through which thousands of therapists, as 1099 contracted “employees,” bill under Alma’s National Provider Identifier at that higher negotiated rate.
But ethically — it was more complicated. Some insurance companies were Alma investors; Flanagan opted out of the company’s record-keeping system because she knew that her patients’ (anonymized) information would likely be passed on to those insurance companies for who-knows-what-ends. She also opted out of a voice-to-text artificial intelligence tool developed in partnership with another venture capital-backed firm, due to even more privacy concerns.
She says they also pushed her to encourage her clients to sign up for autopay — making the burden of payment squarely on the client, even though it is common for insurance plans to get estimates wrong: “Imagine a client seeing a surprise credit card charge for thousands of dollars when they were barely scraping together a $35 co-pay.”
Therapists are drawn to these apps because of the poor work conditions that they often experience on their own. Therapists “typically dislike big business in the sacred space of therapy, and we’d rather keep them out of the place where we store our most sensitive information about the care we provide,” Flanagan writes. “But mental health platforms are banking on us being poor enough to look the other way.”
Get The Medium Newsletter’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
👀 Reads you need
- As more than 200 fires burn in Canada (with over 100 categorized as “out of control”), Canadian resident and travel writer Ricky Lanusse contributes exhaustive reporting on the various regions affected and how climate change has instigated this awful scenario. “Human-induced heat is the megafuel. We’re the matchbox and the wind.”
- Product manager Camila Barreto seems to have done the impossible: She was able to actually fix her severely broken team dynamics. Lucky for us, she wrote out her strategy. It includes initiatives such as creating a one-stop-shop website for the team to unite on mission and data, as well as creating a template for the team to share ideas.
- Sci-fi writer and games journalist Leigh Alexander concocts a strangely hypnotic story out of fictional Yelp reviews left about stores in a suburban strip mall. No description can do it justice; just read it.
⛑️ Your daily dose of practical wisdom on creating a mental first-aid kit
“I made a list called ‘Reset me.’ It’s on my phone. It’s full of things that bring me back to my happy place. No thinking required.” — Thomas Oppong in 15 Tiny Mental Reset Habits to Rewire Your Brain for Clarity in Minutes
✍️ The “Write with Medium” June micro-challenge
We know, it can be hard to start writing. So this month, we’re trying a little experiment: Subscribe to our pop-up newsletter and spend the month writing with us — get daily prompts, practical approaches, and support in your inbox, and you’ll be publishing the story only you can tell by the end of the month. Join us!
Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.
