Virtual behavioral health provider Brightside Health has expanded into addiction treatment by acquiring Lionrock Recovery.
The move expands San Francisco-based Brightside Health into virtual addiction treatment. Specifically, the acquisition adds a virtual intensive outpatient program (IOP) to Brightside’s fleet of services. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
It also addresses a significant overlap in patients’ behavioral health needs: often, underlying mental health issues contribute to a use disorder, and vice versa. Brightside Health previously had to refer patients whose primary issue was addiction treatment to other providers. Now, the company can support more issues for more patients.
This, in turn, makes Brightside a more attractive partner for payers and health systems.
“We’ve really emphasized and leaned into wanting to be the strongest in the market at treating individuals with the highest severity and acuity, the hard-to-treat cases,” Brad Kittredge, the CEO of Brightside Health, told Addiction Treatment Business. “We’ve realized as we looked at discharge flow from the emergency department that if we don’t treat substance use disorders, we’re missing a big part of the needs and the pain points that our partners have.”
Previously, Brightside Health has worked with patients with varying levels of alcohol use disorder (AUD), where that was a secondary issue to other mental health concerns, Kittredge said.
While a new part of the business, Kittredge expects the IOP for addiction treatment to grow as it builds more relationships with health systems, which have often been skeptical of virtual providers. He says there is a nascent shift in the marketplace as more time passes and virtual care companies begin to prove their mettle.
Founded in 2010, Lionrock Recovery was an early move in virtual support for mental health and addiction treatment. It enhances abstinence-based programming with harm reduction approaches, including an adapted version of the Sinclair method for treating AUD.
In March, Ashley Loeb Blassingame, co-founder and chief communications officer for Lionrock Recovery, said the company had been acquired but didn’t say by which organization.
The acquisition and expansion of services for Brightside Health continues a string of key developments over the last few months. In March, it raised a $33 million Series C round. In October 2023, the company announced its expansion into treating patients with Medicare and Medicaid health plan coverage. In December 2022, it developed a suicide prevention program.
The IOP calls for three three-hour group therapy sessions, a one-hour one-on-one therapy session with homework and reflection work. The company does not prescribe controlled substances. So, medication management, which Brightside Health already does, will be limited to naltrexone, a common treatment for AUD and, in some cases, opioid use disorder (OUD). The program typically lasts 16 weeks.
Virtual IOPs present a less disruptive option for people seeking recovery than traditional IOPs. This, in part, presents a compelling opportunity to help people get treatment that is more convenient and, therefore, more retentive. The startup Charlie Health offers high-acuity services via virtual IOPs to teens and young adults in 30 states via commercial health plans and Medicaid. Private equity-backed Lightfully Behavioral Health also offers virtual IOP.
However, some payers do not validate the model through their benefit structures. Aetna, one of the largest health plans, nixed its coverage of virtual IOP services last year, a move that industry insiders called “alarming.”
