Payer-Supported Mental Health is Changing the Healthcare Game with James Farese, Founder and CEO of ReachLink

[00:00:01] This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare exclusive digital marketing agency. Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945.

[00:00:30] Hey everyone, welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket. So excited you joined us for another episode of Founder Stories. I am here with the outstanding James Farese. He is the founder and CEO of ReachLink, super hyper-focused on mental health. He was ahead of the game before actual virtual care happened in mental health. He was doing it. And so I'm super excited to have him on the podcast. James, thanks for joining.

[00:00:59] Thanks, Saul. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Of course, man. Of course, you and I, we were having a great discussion on entrepreneurship before we hit record and super great. I want to help you tell your story. Tell us about you, your business. What do you guys do? How is it different? Why does it matter? Yeah, absolutely. My business is ReachLink. We're an online mental health platform, digital mental health platform,

[00:01:22] where we connect people looking for help with things like anxiety, depression, workplace stress, family relationship issues. We help them connect with the licensed provider, talk therapy provider in their state. And I've been in the industry, the behavioral health industry for about 10 years. I started out working in and operating, owning substance use treatment facilities and started looking at telehealth as a solution for people discharging from these facilities.

[00:01:49] In 2018, really as just like my intention was to create like a boutique aftercare solution for people post discharge and try to extend the continuum of care a little bit after they left the facility. And launch in early 2019, COVID happened about a year to the month later, stuck around a lot longer than we thought it would. And so we decided to expand the scope from just addiction aftercare to more general mental health. Never really intended to be this scale up solution, but that's what ended up, that ended up happening anyway.

[00:02:18] So fast forward to today, we built our own proprietary tech platform for both providers and users to connect. We have a number of digital mental health tools like journaling where they can use these features in companion with their talk therapy solution where most of our business is now payer supported. And so we're in network with a lot of the major payers throughout the country, Aetna, Cigna, and then a number of regional payers as well. And we're working on scaling the business.

[00:02:49] We have almost 400 providers on the platform. We've seen a lot of growth last year and expect a lot more growth this year. And we're really just focused on building the best provider experience and the best user experience. We believe quality care is downstream from the provider experience. So we started with that, building a lot of provider tools to enhance operational efficiency, decrease administrative burden. And now that we've built a lot of those tools, we're starting to build some of these more longitudinal support tools for the member,

[00:03:17] such as journaling and other features to kind of to go along as a companion to the talk therapy care. That's awesome, James. Congrats on the growth. Didn't expect it was going to go this way, but it did. And you embraced it and you built. Are you completely out of the substance abuse care facilities? Yeah, I've been out of that since I launched ReachLink. ReachLink was a spinoff and that took all my time and has taken all my time since. Love it, man. That's cool.

[00:03:46] I mean, look, we need the services. We need the tech. The numbers are very clear. There's not enough providers to the need. So I think it's great that you're doing this. So talk to us about the model. What end customer do you serve in the healthcare ecosystem? I get asked that question a lot. And it's somewhat of a, if you're not super familiar with kind of healthcare operations, complicated answer. But we serve a number of end users, depending on the lens that you look at it through. So we serve payers. We serve members, obviously. And we serve providers.

[00:04:16] And we think about goals, right? For providers, they want us to fill their caseload. They want kind of a seamless billing and insurance experience. They want tools to make their workload more efficient. It really for us to make it easier to care for the member of the patient. For the clients, they want access. They want fast access. They want a clear understanding when it comes to their benefit, what it's going to cost, navigating the whole payer piece.

[00:04:43] And then when we work with payers, it's a little bit of a different model because they care more about outcomes. And so tracking outcomes, especially as we go into value-based contracts, being able to show why our case rate should be a certain rate or why we can deliver the same results or better in a shorter period of time. So we kind of have to think about the solution that we build through multiple lenses. And so it really depends on which cohort you're asking.

[00:05:07] But we really serve three end users, the person receiving therapy, the provider delivering the care, and then the payer, which is covering the cost for the member and payment for the provider. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And the good news here, James, is that our audience is very versed in health care. So essentially, payers pay, and then you provide a great opportunity for providers to deliver the service and always keeping the member in mind, delivering the best quality outcomes.

[00:05:37] Yep. And we try to make that easier for the provider. So we'll do things like we'll accelerate payments to the provider. So we'll handle the insurance piece, and they don't have to wait to get paid. So we try to bridge some of those gaps to make it a really seamless experience. And we're always looking for ways to find more efficiency there. Good for you, man. I think it's great to, like, especially in value-based models, like, that's one of the hang-ups, right? Like, just the delayed payments. So if you guys are fronting those, that's a huge win for a lot of providers.

[00:06:06] Look, you've been successful. We love learning from successful people. What's your favorite business resource or business hack that you'd recommend to our listeners working on their own business? That's a really good question. I think there's a lot of things that you can do to try to grow tech, and it's probably dependent on your business and your industry. One thing that I did, especially early on, is when you're looking at complicated businesses and markets that you're operating in, especially regulated markets like healthcare,

[00:06:35] one thing that I did understand agreements between payers and providers and that sort of thing is I would actually look at public SEC filings. So if you actually go through and read some of these SEC filings, you can see how deals are structured and how payers pay and how providers receive payment and how they structure terms to stay compliant. Could be wrong, but I think it's called their Edgar system where you can go on and kind of look up contracts and anything that's public related to a filing.

[00:07:00] And it's not just 10K for public companies, but also you'll see they had to solicit. If it's a solicited investment, there might be certain documents that become public. And so I'd cruise those for healthcare deals. And I actually learned a lot about, especially early on, about how a lot of these deals are structured. So if your industry is somewhat regulated and you want to see how some of the bigger players are operating, looking through some of these filings, you get into some of the inner workings. And I found that really fascinating. That's great, man.

[00:07:30] It's like a treasure chest of how things are structured. And did you find that having that insight helped accelerate deals at any point? Or did you feel like it helped you move faster? I think it definitely helped me talk more intelligently about certain subjects for sure. A lot of things, you're lucky if you can kind of learn them through osmosis. For a lot of us, we kind of have to learn through trial and error.

[00:07:53] But then when you have some of these kind of super unique or specific types of deal structures that are really specific to not maybe your industry, but your segment of your industry, unless you've worked at a large payer or worked at a large provider, you're probably not getting proximity to some of these conversations. And so for me, it helped me speak more intelligently as a small provider growing into being a larger provider without having to have a ton of experience working at a payer or something like that.

[00:08:20] So definitely helped me speak more intelligently about a lot of the things I was growing into. I love it, man. Hey, look, and for everybody listening to this, 2% of you will do this. I'm just saying you will hear this and say, oh, that's a great idea. But only 2% of you will do it. So like the ones that do, you'll get a leg up. And I hope that you take it as a challenge that I want you guys to do what James just offered because it's a really smart move. Thanks for that, James. That's a really great one.

[00:08:51] And maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like with our audience, maybe it'll be more like 10%. But I want to challenge everyone to take action on what you learn. And look, speaking of taking action, James, I want to thank you for joining us today. What you're doing is making a huge difference in our country. People need this care and it needs to be convenient and accessible and affordable. What's the best place our listeners can get in touch with you to learn more, whether it be to pay or the provider or the patient? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:09:18] So I can be reached on LinkedIn, somewhat active on there. And then for our company, our website is reachlink.com. Our email is hello at reachlink.com. And our phone number is 833-732-2489. I love it, James. James, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a real pleasure here on Founder Stories on the Outcomes Rocket. Folks, check out the show notes. We'll leave the link there to get in touch with James Rees, CEO and founder of Reachlink. Make sure you check him out.

[00:09:48] And James, thanks for joining us. Thank you. I appreciate it, Saul. This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare exclusive digital marketing agency. Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth.

[00:10:17] Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945. Thank you.