Nearly half of the U.S. population lives in a mental health workforce shortage area. Horizon Healthcare Services is working to address this by adding Resilience Lab to its commercial network, the companies announced last week.

Horizon Healthcare Services is a New Jersey insurer and is part of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. It has about 3.7 million members. New York City-based Resilience Lab is a mental health provider that matches patients with therapists based on their unique needs and offers in-person and online care. It provides individual therapy, couples therapy, family therapy and parenting coaching.

Resilience Lab is “now a participating mental healthcare provider with Horizon” and is part of the insurer’s managed care and preferred provider organization commercial networks, said Marc Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of Resilience. This means that Horizon’s 2.5 million commercial members have access to Resilience Lab clinicians. By the end of the year, Resilience aims to have 50 clinicians located in New Jersey.

When patients start with Resilience Lab, they have a 15 minute consultation with the company’s care team to help determine patients’ needs. Based on that consultation, the care team matches the patient with a therapist, and the patient can choose a time for their first therapy session.

The mental health provider is in a fee-for-service payment contract with Horizon. However, it hopes to change that arrangement in the future.

“We would like to work closely with Horizon to eventually move away from a fee-for-service contract to a value-based contract where we help manage the member’s total cost of care,” Goldberg said in an email.

By joining Horizon’s network, Resilience Lab can now reach 50% of the Northeast commercial market across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Goldberg stated. 

“The agreement with Horizon is another step Resilience Lab has taken to ease the mental health burden in the U.S.,” he said.

The news comes at a time when just 72.7% of people’s mental health needs in New Jersey are being met, according to KFF. Many therapists don’t accept insurance, often forcing patients to pay out of pocket and worsening the gap in access to mental health support. Resilience Lab ultimately aims to improve these challenges.

“We are constantly looking to expand in-network services, as patients often have difficulty affording mental healthcare without insurance coverage,” Goldberg said.

Other mental health companies in the space include Alma, Headway and GrowTherapy. However, the key difference between these companies and Resilience Lab is that they have networks of 1099 (in other words independent) clinicians, and Resilience Lab’s clinicians are W2 employees, according to Goldberg. 

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