Mental health provider Resilience Lab has expanded to offer medication management and treat severe mental illness by acquiring AI-enabled psychiatry provider Options MD.
The acquisition will improve Resilience Lab’s ability to negotiate with payers and bring the provider closer to its “North Star” of providing fully integrative care.
“We always wanted to extend our reach to more serious cases, people who require medication, people who have depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, etc.,” Marc Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of Resilience Lab, told Behavioral Health Business. “So we spent the last year looking for doctors that we could work with to reach more serious cases. We met Options MD … and fell in love with that team because what they had been doing was very much in line with our philosophy.”
New York City-based Resilience Lab provides hybrid therapy and employs over 250 clinicians. It also operates an education program to develop new mental health clinicians and has trained more than 500 clinicians. In 2022, Resilience Lab raised $15 million in a Series A funding round, primarily earmarked for this training program.
Resilience Lab made behavioral health history in early 2023 when its clinicians successfully unionized, a first among large behavioral health providers.
Before acquiring Options MD, Resilience Lab clinicians were only working with what Goldberg described as “the worried well.” He defined this population as a group who seek help to improve their life but without severe mental health issues.
Acquiring Options MD not only allows Resilience Lab to offer its patients psychiatry services, it gives Resilience Lab access to an AI platform designed to support clinical intake and make diagnosis and treatment recommendations.
Los Angeles-based Options MD was founded in 2020. It provides specialized virtual psychiatric care for severe mental health conditions including serious and treatment-resistant depression, mood and anxiety disorders, and PTSD. Its treatment offerings include pharmaceuticals, intensive behavioral therapies, non-pharmaceutical options and lifestyle changes.
The provider has received more than $6 million in funding from investors including Techstars, Bread and Butter Ventures, Collab Capital, Level Up Ventures, Med Mountain Ventures, and M13.
Resilience Labs and Options MD clinicians will provide care through a team-based model, Christine Carville, co-founder and chief clinical officer, told BHB.
“Either the clients come in through our care coordination team and are matched with the therapist that works for them ideally,” Carville said. “Then they’re organized to meet with a doctor, should the client ask, be currently on medication, or be of an acuity level that the therapist recommends. Then the therapist and the doctor collaborate on the treatment, the efficacy of whatever is being prescribed, and any breakthrough symptoms or side effects. They work as a team to collaborate.”
Among its capabilities, the AI technology allows clinicians to make “differential diagnoses,” which rule out conflicting possible diagnoses.
OCD can sometimes present similarly to anxiety, Carville said. Options MD’s AI tool uses clinician notes or client reports to pick up on conflicting information and make recommendations.
The acquisition also brings Resilience Lab closer to its ultimate treatment goals.
“This is the most important step towards integrative care, which would be my North Star,” Carville said. “Bringing MDs and prescriber capabilities on board is the first step into integrative care.”
Resilience Lab was, in part, drawn to treat more serious mental health conditions after executives saw demand from payers and hospital systems to offer a fuller suite of services, rather than a point solution.
While acquiring Options MD offers clinical and business benefits, it was not Resilience Lab’s original plan. Executives originally looked to other options, Goldberg said.
“We tried to hire great people, and we looked at every solution from buy versus build, and M&A was an accelerant,” he said. “This is what we have found in Options MD, with its team and its clinical assets. It was not the only solution. We explored a lot of scenarios in order to expand our team and our offerings.”
The acquisition is another tool to use when negotiating with payers, Goldberg said.
Resilience Lab plans to integrate the two businesses through a two-phased approach. The provider will start by offering therapy and psychiatry as two separate lines of business. Executives will then assess how its partners and clients react. Eventually, Resilience Lab plans to integrate both service lines into a “seamless” offering with a single electronic medical record (EMR) and methodology, but it will “take some time,” Goldberg said.
Resilience Lab also filled out its C-suite with Options MD executives. Options MD’s chief medical officer, Dr. Carl Marci, and its head of data science, Dr. Josh Cohen, will fill their same roles at Resilience Lab. Options MD lead psychiatrist will now serve as Resilience Lab’s medical director.
The acquisition comes a year after Resilience Lab launched a group therapy offering designed to help address the shortage of mental health clinicians and improve affordability.
The provider has no immediate plans to expand service lines further or grow its geographic footprint.
“We are really focusing on making this acquisition work so we’re not going to do anything else,” Goldberg said. “We might sign more payers. We’re going to be focusing on demonstrating the value for the client and the payer. Until that’s done, we’re not doing anything else. We’re super hyper-focused on execution.”