Mental health provider Spring Health named Arielle Mortimer its new chief operating officer.
Mortimer is an operations veteran who most recently held the COO role at Heyday, a skincare company. She previously worked as senior vice president of operations at Kindbody, a women’s wellness company that offers services including IVF, egg freezing, gynecology and fertility consultations.
New York City-based Spring Health is a comprehensive mental health solution for employers and health plans. The company serves over 4,500 clients, including General Mills, Bain, and Instacart.
Spring’s valuation reached $2.5 billion in April 2023 after a $71 million raise.
The company has announced several partnerships within the last year, including with 2Morrow Health, Eleanor Health and Highmark Health. Most recently it acquired self-guided therapy tool Bloom Health.
Behavioral Health Business sat down with Mortimer two weeks after she joined the company to discuss operational efficiency, expanding in-person modalities and maintaining an engaged staff. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Behavioral Health Business: How did your experiences before Spring prepare you for this role?
Mortimer: My background has spanned a couple of different categories and industries, but the focus has always been on delivering an amazing customer, client, member, or patient experience with incredible efficiency.
My background started in large-scale events, and then I moved into the DTC e-commerce space. More recently, my career has been in the health and wellness industry, specifically women’s health and skincare. All of that has kind of melded into an amazing opportunity with Spring.
What do you want your impact at Spring to be?
Profitability. For us, it’s really about how we can continue to open access for more customers and patients in a way that is sustainable for the future. I approach operations in a very logical manner, so I’ll be making sure that everything is laddering up to impact. We’re aiming to tackle the things that are going to have the biggest impact first.
What will your approach to technology be?
Leaning into technology will be a huge part of scaling our operations. There’s a sweet spot between supporting our customers and our members through personalized handheld care with human touch but also leveraging technology to enable that relationship to be more efficient.
It’s asking where and how we can leverage tools, new platforms, or what we’ve built internally. How do we take that to the next degree to support those day-to-day things for our team so that they can focus on really delivering that high-touch care? How do we provide the right tools and lean into innovative ideas like AI? How can we leverage that for our provider network to make onboarding for them more streamlined? Or leverage it through our customer support team to triage and get our patients the answers to their questions faster. All of that is on the table for us;it’s just a matter of when and how we do it.
What are some opportunities for Spring to grow?
There is a global opportunity for us. It’s generally reaching more and more customers. For the customers that we currently have, it’s asking how we impact their lives and create more offerings for them so that they feel supported in their healthcare journey.
From an operations standpoint, growth is about how we continue to grow our best-in-class provider network to continue to support our patients and members with different avenues. We have a coaching business and a traditional therapy business, but we will look to expand our in-person interactions with patients and give them more access to different types of care sooner.
What are some current headwinds for Spring?
Last year, we grew over 400% year over year. There’s a huge untapped demand that we’re continuing to pursue, and for me as an operator, it’s wildly exciting. It just poses new challenges around how you ensure that you’re able to meet that demand and provide the right solution for all of your customers in an efficient, effective way. It’s an exciting problem to have.
Spring has recently announced several new partnerships. How would you describe Spring’s partnership strategy?
I haven’t gotten there quite yet in my two weeks, but I know it is top of mind. We ask where partnerships can help us strengthen or support something that a customer is looking for. We are open and we go through a pretty rigorous process to make sure that it’s the right fit for both sides. It’s all about making sure that we can service what our customers are asking for.
What’s Spring’s approach to the shortage of mental health clinicians?
For us, it is all about continuing to be the best-in-class network for providers. We will continue to meet our providers where they are and make sure that we are connecting the right provider with the right patient as quickly as possible. That will continue to unlock the ability for providers to be fulfilled and supported in their profession and hopefully, continue to inspire other want-to-be providers to join the profession.
We also opened our network to coaches outside of just traditional therapists. So we’re trying to expand to be able to provide a varied approach to offerings.
Compensation, regardless of industry, is always something that you need to be aligned on. The provider needs to be aligned to the success of the business and compensation plays a big role in that, as well as a variety of other things that make you feel fulfilled in what you’re doing on a day-to-day. The balance of all of that is really important to us and a project that I am very excited to sink my teeth into.
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