Headway, a startup that matches patients to mental health clinicians, is expanding its leadership team with a new chief of strategy and head of medical and clinical strategy.
Startup vet Matt Hackett will be responsible for leading product, design and research at Headway in his new role as chief strategy officer and head of product. Before joining Headway, he served as the interim COO for digital events company Hopin. He has previously held roles at Beme, CNN and Tumblr. Hackett also confounded live broadcast startup Oda and invested in a number of other startups including SUPERPLASTIC, LULA and Aanika Biosciences.
“I’ve worked with a lot of high-growth startups, but nowhere have I witnessed a team that prizes rigor as highly as kindness,” Hackett said in a Linkedin post about the new position. “This is a truly unusual team, and one I could not be more excited to spend the next chapter of my career helping build.”
The New York-based company tapped Dr. Nicole Christian-Braithwaite to serve as its head of medical and clinical strategy. Christian-Braithwaite is a trained adult, child and adolescent psychiatrist. Currently she operates her own private practice and sits on the Board of Directors of New England Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (NECCAP).
Founded in 2017, Headway created a digital platform designed to help connect patients to mental health providers in their insurance network. The company has garnered investor attention. In 2021 Headway closed a $70 million funding round. This brought the company’s total raise to $100 million.
The company works with a number of payers including Aetna, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, United, Cigna, Oscar, Oxford and a number of regional blues.
Over the Summer the company joined forces with CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield on a new effort aimed at helping members more easily find behavioral health providers. As part of the partnership CareFirst members are able to use Headway’s platform to find in-network behavioral health clinicians. Patients can use the tool to see provider availability, treatment areas and demographics.
The company also appears to be expanding. In October it announced that it was expanding into California. This marked the company’s fifteenth state market.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misstated Matthew Hackett’s title. The article has been updated to correct this.
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