How did an investment professional, an MD-MBA student at Harvard and a technologist come together to create a mental healthcare startup? Well, it all started when Jake Cooper, Manoj Kanagaraj and Alan Ni became friends while attending Duke University in North Carolina. Then in the summer of 2020, they reconnected.
The men were upset and disappointed because their loved ones weren’t able to access mental healthcare due to the lack of insurance acceptance among providers. At the same time, they also learned that their friends in the behavioral healthcare industry were underpaid, restricted by employers and struggling with the complexity of starting their own mental healthcare practices. That’s when they decided to create Grow Therapy.
Grow Therapy is a behavioral healthcare group that helps smooth the process for providers to launch their own practices. The startup also increases access to high-quality, affordable mental healthcare for clients.
If you're a providers, starting your own independent practice is difficult for a couple of reasons. “It's difficult because no one learns how to do that in medical school and starting businesses is challenging. And the majority of our country relies on our insurance and our reimbursement system to actually pay for healthcare, and the system structurally favors larger groups versus individuals,” said Cooper, co-founder and CEO.
Because the system favors larger groups, it’s faster for healthcare providers to join an insurance network, they generally get paid better rates, and it’s easier to interface with large clinical partners like hospitals. But joining a group practice also has disadvantages: Group practices can take anywhere from 40 percent to 60 percent of earnings from providers, can restrict a provider's autonomy and can dictate whom a provider can see and where.
“We're here to simplify the entire practice experience by essentially owning the infrastructure setup and the actual operations, while giving providers total autonomy over the things that they care about," Cooper said.
When a provider signs up with Grow Therapy, they join the company’s insurance contracts and onboard through its practice-management system, which allows them to manage their clients and access scheduling and note-taking technology. Grow Therapy also has a marketing-distribution system that disperses providers’ profiles to clients who might be a good fit. And the company also gives providers end-to-end billing support and access to a central administrative team that handles intake, triage care and after hours calls, the company said.
“Lastly, we built a phenomenal provider community where providers interface with each other, both clinically and personally, to ensure that they're not taking their first steps into independent practice alone," Cooper said.
And signing up for Grow Therapy is simple for both providers and clients. Once on the website, providers just need to click the “provider” icon on the top right corner of the screen and fill out an application on the landing page. It’s important to note that after onboarding it can take three to five months for credentialing before providers can start to see in-network clients. And if you’re a client looking for care, you can go to the company’s website, select your insurance, condition and availability and use Grow Therapy’s marketplace to search for providers that might be the best fit for you. You can also find a provider over the phone using the company’s patient-care navigation team.
Grow Therapy vets providers looking to join its network that includes face-to-face interviews.
“We do extensive background checks, and checks on their clinical practice history. And our credentialing and approval process is comprehensive enough such that major insurance payers have actually delegated the authority for us to approve our providers to their network, as opposed to us asking for permission. One level of infrastructure that we built out that we feel is of utmost importance is ensuring that we work with amazing providers and clients trust your therapy when they come to the site,” said Cooper.
Once a provider completes the vetting process, they get added to the company’s contracts and are added to the platform.
Grow Therapy was a part of Harvard i-Lab’s 2021 Spring Venture Program. Although the company currently operates out of Florida, Grow Therapy is about to launch in seven other states. And besides its plans for a national expansion, the company is also set to do a round of fundraising in a month.
This fundraising round will help fuel the company’s expansion and contribute to the mission of the company: “to change the way providers practice and to massively increase healthcare access.”
