‘The Future of Care Delivery Is Hybrid’: Resilience Lab Re-Opens Headquarters for In-Person Visits

New York City-based Resilience Lab has opened its headquarters in the Flatiron District to in-person visits, announcing that the organization will shift its care delivery to a hybrid model.

The fast-growing outpatient mental health provider shifted “99.9” to telehealth in a week and upended its hyper-local approach to giving access to mental health services, Marc Goldberg, Resilience Lab CEO and co-founder, told Behavioral Health Business.

“We talked to our clinician for six months. We said, ‘Do you want to come back? Do you believe that it’s important for us to have an in-person presence?’ And the message was yes. So we’re doing it,” Goldberg said.

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In March 2020, the company closed all its offices and renegotiated its leases.

“We just shut it down,” Goldberg said of how Resilience Lab approached COVID-19.

New York City was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the early days of the crisis. The first wave of the pandemic and many of the deaths from COVID-19 was largely restricted to the Northeast, especially New York City, from March to June 2020, according to a retrospective review by the Pew Research Center.

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When the company was founded in July 2019, Resilience Lab wanted to have a network of small offices all over New York’s boroughs.

Resilience Lab Co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer Christine Carville said this network of small offices was meant to integrate therapy into patients’ neighborhoods and routines.

“The premise was accessibility, to have as many offices as we could to be as close to our clients as possible,” Carville said. “That [way] it wasn’t this big deal that you would have to travel far to come to see a therapist.”

The accessibility premise remained in the pivot to telehealth and remains in the pivot to the hybrid model, Carville said. The move is meant to facilitate the best care possible for patients of all ages and all levels of need. She said this will be especially beneficial for collaboration among young patients and patients with severe trauma.

Goldberg and Carville said they expect the headquarters will account for about 20% of sessions that occur in New York, with about 500 visits facilitated through the six therapy rooms in the space at Broadway and 21st Street; the remaining 80% will be facilitated by telehealth.

It’s not clear what will happen in terms of telehealth/in-person mix in the future for Resilience Lab. Goldberg tied telehealth utilization to bigger questions about how people live their lives which are in flux because of the pandemic, invoking questions about the future of work and of cities.

The company itself announced a recent expansion throughout the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Resilience is now available to 33 million tri-state area residents, with access open to residents who are in-network with UnitedHealthcare and Humana.

“We will see, we will iterate,” Goldberg said.

Resilience Lab will be incurring additional costs by reestablishing locations to have offices open. But the cost will be worth it.

Reopening the office will help Resilience Lab reestablish its more traditional approach to facilitating feelings of connection and enabling the therapeutic relationship, Carville said.

“So I see us having in-person environments as being another opportunity for us to create community and collaborate and in a way that wasn’t available to us before,” Carville said.

Goldberg didn’t say where the next in-person location will work, saying that the company will learn as it goes.

“This is all leading to, ‘What are you building?” Goldberg said. “Are you building for sustainability … Or are you building for short-term EBITDA? We’re building for quality of care whatever the cost is.”

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