What You Should Know:
– Color Health acquires Mood Lifters, a leading group-based mental health company and launches a new behavioral health product. The new solution will expand access to mental healthcare for organizations tackling public and population health.
– Mood Lifters uses an evidence-based treatment paradigm developed by Dr. Patricia Deldin and Dr. Cecilia Votta at the University of Michigan. Crucially, groups are led by participants who have completed the course themselves, enabling a sustainable source of new coaches with significantly lower costs than individual teletherapy.
Addressing Care Gaps in Mental Healthcare
More than 50% of people who need mental healthcare do not receive it, and the median time between the onset of a patient’s symptoms and their first treatment is now 11 years. These gaps in care are created and exacerbated by a shortage of skilled providers and access challenges, including cost and logistical issues.
Color’s behavioral health solution creates timely access to behavioral health screening and counseling, embeds care access points and resources directly into neighborhoods and community spaces, is in-network with leading Medicaid and Medicare plans in all 50 states and delivers multilingual, culturally appropriate care.
The solution is purpose-built to support organizations like public health departments and schools, by:
– Enabling more efficient screening: This flexible solution integrates into other screenings, including community sites, and allows organizations to catalog, manage, and continuously update local and community resources, as well as connect individuals to those resources for more acute or additional care needs.
– Providing high-availability access to clinicians, therapists, and coaches: Color’s network approach allows access to community tools and acute need escalation within 48 hours. The network of community sites and partners – including coaches, therapists, and licensed psychiatrists – is built to scale and flex to each community’s needs.
– Utilizing a group-based mental health approach: Color provides a cost-effective and community-oriented model of peer-based mental health, built on Mood Lifters’ clinically validated platform. This non-clinical support for individuals of all ages has been scientifically demonstrated to improve anxiety and depressive symptoms, including a nearly 50% symptom reduction among participants with moderate to severe anxiety and depression.
– Prioritizing sustainability: Color provides insurance billing infrastructure to enroll and credential providers (including state Medicare and Medicaid plans), billing management, and support for large programs that increase effective capacity.
– Building for public health and underserved populations: Color’s solution can integrate into existing community resources, is HIPAA-compliant, provides support for multiple languages and be accessed online and offline, and integrates clinical and non-clinical networks representing culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds. With canvassing and community support, organizations can quickly stand-up community sites at schools, libraries, post offices, and other community spaces.
