Blackbird, a neuroscience-backed hybrid mental health provider for children and young adults, raised $17 million in February in a Series A funding round led by Define Ventures with participation from Frist Cressey Ventures and GreyMatter, bringing its total raise to $23 million..
The company’s CEO, Tom Peterson, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss why he went from initially being an investor to its CEO and how he’s now helping scale the platform to impact individuals struggling with mental health issues.
MobiHealthNews: Can you tell our readers a bit about Blackbird?
Tom Peterson: So, I started a company called Evolent Health with two other people and ran that for ten years, and I left there right at the beginning of COVID, and I have five kids. I also had gone back before Evolent and got a Master’s in mental health counseling. So, mental health has always been a big priority of mine. I used that mental health background to help build the clinical model for Evolent, which was really about wrapping care around primary care to move to value-based care arrangements.
After leaving Evolent, I was home during COVID with five kids; now they’re 23 down to six. Three of my kids had pretty significant issues with the mental health care system around that time and with mental health in general. My oldest, who is now 23, had pretty significant issues with depression, treatment-resistant depression, where she was on three different SSRIs, and, you know, nothing seemed to work. She had bad side effects with each of them. My now eight-year-old was kicked out of three different preschools, and we were worried about whether he would be able to stay in the fourth. We didn’t really know what was going on, and later was diagnosed with some autism features, anxiety, some speech-language deficits, and a laundry list of issues.
And so my experience with the healthcare system was just a lot of trial and error where we, you know, it just seemed like we weren’t getting it right and we were just throwing stuff at the wall. I just felt like the standard of care wasn’t really meeting my expectations, and I could afford to pay for the best care and access was not the problem that I was experiencing.
So, I went looking for a model that was focused on this problem of long-time stabilization and trial and error and that’s when I was introduced to the folks at Blackbird.
MHN: Blackbird recently secured $17 million in Series A funding. What will the company do with the funds?
Peterson: The money is going to be used in a couple of different ways. Our approach is to build community density with a hybrid clinical model. So we put what we call light local clinics into markets, and a certain amount of our care is delivered out of those clinics, but we do a lot of virtual care around that. Then, we build relationships with community referral sources, such as schools, doctors, and pediatricians in those markets. We’re going to be expanding the markets that we’re in, and there are dollars that go into the marketing and getting those clinics up and running.
We’ll be growing largely in the mid-Atlantic states and we use our payer relationships to go from state-to-state. We build strong relationships with payers, and then those payers will kind of take us into the next state.
So, the first thing we’ll be doing is really using that money to expand into new geographies. But again, doing that in a way that is disciplined and kind of growing in a way that’s very based off of this community engagement model versus trying to be in 50 states all at once and running into a challenge with matching supply and demand, which I think a lot of digital health companies have experienced. It also helps us maintain low patient acquisition costs because we’re getting a significant portion of our businesses coming from word of mouth in these local communities where we don’t have to spend any money on marketing to get them.
Secondary is to improve our infrastructure. So, new digital tools, the underlying technology backbone, that we’ll be using to scale up our clinical model on workflow tools and enhance our EHR.
There’s a portion of what we do that is really focused on data because we take data points that we gather about the human across these eight different domains and we use that to identify what we call a biotype, which is sort of clusters of similar types of brain features, and then using that data to then build treatment plans around that biotype to make sure that we’re treating that underlying root cause.
And so, using that data, you can continue to get smarter about the correlation between the underlying symptoms, the biotypes, the treatment plans and the outcomes. That becomes a flywheel to continue to improve your treatment plans. And so that’s an area that we’re going to continue to invest in and get better use of that underlying data. Then expanding leadership and GNA [general and administrative expenses] to support our scale would be the third major category.
MHN: Is there anything else you want to add?
Peterson: The only other thing that I think is important is that we are really working to expand capacity in this space. So, we have residency programs…and it goes from psychiatry to prescribing nurse practitioners to therapists to speech-language pathologists, where we’re taking them right out of school and we’re putting them through a residency program in our model to build additional capacity. Because ultimately, you know, the shortage is something that has to be addressed, and you can’t really address the problem without also addressing the supply issue. So, we think that’s an important part as well.
