The COVID-19 pandemic has been a significant mental health challenge for kids. During 2020, rates of anxiety and depression in children ages 3 to 17 climbed 29% and 27%, respectively, compared to 2016.
Offering support to teens is critical as half of youth mental health conditions start by the age of 14, according to the American Psychiatric Association.
BeMe Health, a digital behavioral health platform, targets teen mental health. Its partnerships include those with insurer Molina Healthcare in Florida and California, and Inland Empire Health Plan. The company’s mobile app offers live virtual sessions with therapists, asynchronous coaching and crisis support for teens.
Healthcare Dive spoke with Nicki Tessler, CEO and cofounder of BeMe Health, to learn about mobile mental health coaching and its new partnerships with payers.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
HEALTHCARE DIVE: How does BeMe work? What types of mental health support are available digitally?
NICKI TESSLER: The digital assets are like self-driving, self-serving support.
Teens are looking at digital content now in mobile media platforms, and it's very captivating, but it's not always high quality. And so what we know is that we've got to captivate them — because if we don't play that appeal game, we can't reach them with the clinical rigor.
You’ve got to have the medicine, but maybe you need a little honey. It makes it more palatable and goes down smoother. I think that's a difference with teens. They have to like it and need it.
The interactive care activities are like a mini app store. A kid might draw a sea creature. What they don't know is it's actually a dialectical behavioral therapy skill for distress tolerance. It allows them not to just ingest content that's science-backed, but then it's coupled with behavioral activation, so that they can take action.
Would you say the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the mental health crisis?
I think COVID revealed just how bad the mental health status of teens was.
What I would argue is that it's not just COVID. You look at the mass shootings, the conflicts around the world right now and some of the social justice impact in the U.S., and what the teens have been confronted with is an onslaught of traumatic events that have really impacted their way in the world.
I also think if there is a small light silver lining, it's that COVID revealed not just the need for mental health support but an understanding that it’s teens. They're not little adults. Retrofitting adults to teens isn't going to do the trick.
You recently announced a $1.5 million funding investment from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas. How did that come about?
We set out to do a payer partnership with them to really go after 20,000 Kansas teens. Just like everywhere else in the world, Kansas really is feeling the impact of the teen mental health crisis.
Mental health has really struggled with scalability and being personalized. It's been super important to solve those legacy pain points, and this partnership is going to allow us to just continue to ramp up as a company.
We're in several markets today, and a few of our contracts went from state-based to either a national or corporate contract, which allows us to get into more states quicker.
We've been just working at existing partnerships, leveraging them for more expansion opportunities across other states as well as bringing in more employer groups and other lines of business, foster care populations and military families. All of these are really important teen populations that I think BeMe is well suited for.
What ages do you target now, and do you plan to provide services for people younger or older?
Right now we're about 13 to 19. There might be an opportunity to go toward tweens. Because of [the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule], we went with 13 and up. If some of those changes happen, and we want to do more of a tween age of 10 to 12, we could look to that as an expansive opportunity, but that would be more on the road map later.
Last year, your company released data in conjunction with Stanford University evaluating the effects of digital behavioral health platforms. What are your plans for further research?
In our first peer-reviewed publication with Stanford, they examined 13,000 teens. It really showed the impact we’re having on self-esteem and hopefulness and that we're having that impact we so desperately want to have. We followed up with our seven-day outcome study, which really showed a reduction in depression and reduction in anxiety.
We have several partnerships for Medicaid as well as commercial. We’re working with them as true thought partners, looking at things like claims data and reconciling it with BeMe data to see what type of impact are we having on everything from ED visits, utilization rates around inpatient, unnecessary inpatient admissions, readmissions, and then outpatient, both in terms of helping with the effectiveness but also gaps of care.
