MIND 24-7 wants to create a new proverbial — and to some extent literal — front door for behavioral health. And in the process, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based startup hopes to do to behavioral health what urgent care did to physical health.
The company, founded in May 2021, has developed a business model that features 24/7 walk-in access to behavioral health care. The company borrows from the retail-heavy model of all-hours pharmacies in several ways — so much so that one of the organizations’ three current locations is housed in a former Walgreens location.
Two of the company’s top executives told Behavioral Health Business that the company hopes to meet the unmet access need in behavioral health by allowing anyone to walk to a clinic with any mental health issue.
As MIND 24-7 CEO Jeff Spight explained to Behavioral Health Business, it’s highly unlikely that a person will be able to see a clinician in an office setting any sooner than several days or even weeks out, leaving the emergency room as the only other option for urgent behavioral health needs.
“I think those are wonderful places but they’re really not staffed and set up to deal with the patients that we see,” Spight said. “It takes quite a bit of different skill sets and resources to handle a psych crisis patient or even urgent crisis needs.”
Too often, people who present at an emergency room who require more than four hours of attention get pushed toward inpatient interment for two weeks, Spight said, because there isn’t any other clearly recognized level of care. MIND 24-7 seeks to fill that space. About 70% of those who come to MIND 24-7 are home within 24 hours, according to Spight.
Nicole Bradberry, chief innovation officer for MIND 24-7, hopes to establish the capability and the identity of having wide availability for patients. The company also hopes to disrupt mental health care distribution with a model that hasn’t existed in a prominent way before.
“We want to be the Starbucks of mental health,” Bradberry said. “Everybody made coffee at home forever until Starbucks came along and created a new way to deliver coffee. It was a new experience. It was a new quality. … And I think [MIND 24-7] not only repeatable across markets, but it’s something new, something that’s so necessary and needed.”
The company opened its newest location in Mesa, Arizona. The company hired 150 additional employees to support the clinic, bringing the company’s total workforce to about 310. By the end of the year, MIND 24-7 hopes to have around 500 or 600 employees and five states with one location outside of Arizona, potentially in Las Vegas, Spight said.
All of the three MIND 24-7 locations are in prominent, high-traffic locations with large signage. The company’s three clinics are staffed, equipt and built to handle “something like 98%” of behavioral health walk-ins. Care options range from people coping with anxiety to addiction to the psychological crisis.
Each clinic offers three lines of service: Express Care, Crisis Care and a program called Progressions.
Express Care offers urgent mental health visits that typically take an hour or two hours and help avoid ER trips. Crisis Care offers mental health crisis stabilization by a multi-disciplinary team until the patient is ready for discharge or transition to intensive treatment settings. Progressions offers transitional mental health care before a specialized care setting placement and seeks to address social determinants of health until patients are referred to other community or medical partners.
MIND 24-7 treats everyone from a demographic standpoint. This includes adults, children and those in the custody of law enforcement.
A key state government program allows MIND 24-7 to provide care to anyone who walks in the door. The company has a contract with a regional behavioral health authority in Arizona that provides block grant funding to provide crisis services to teens and children, Spight said. Bradberry added that the regional behavioral health authority will cover behavioral health services for anyone who doesn’t have insurance.
The company got its start when it landed $20 million in private equity funding from New York City-based Regal Healthcare Capital Management, a fund that is led by physicians and invests exclusively in health care companies.
Regal Healthcare Co-founder and General Partner Dr. David Kim founded and led Premier Care Urgent Care until it merged with CityMD in 2013, which presently operates over 135 locations in New York and New Jersey. Spight said there are a lot of parallels between what MIND 24-7 is trying to achieve and what urgent care in decades past.
“Urgent care back then was just not as popular. People were like, ‘Why would I not go to my normal primary care doctor? If I really need help, I go to the emergency room,’” Spight said, adding that the urgent care setting is a vital part of the national health care sector.
“Instead of spending hours and hours in the emergency room or waiting two weeks to get in your primary care doc, I could go in today. I can get in, get it taken care of and I’m out.”