Legion Health has raised a $6.3 million seed round to support a pivot in the digital mental health startup’s focus.
The Austin, Texas-based company was founded originally to help other health care organizations scale clinical mental health operations with a digital marketplace platform. Now, it operates a digital psychiatry practice that uses AI anywhere it can to make the business more effective.
Yash Patel, the company’s CEO, told Behavioral Health Business that his team is growing Legion Health in an “AI native way.”
“We deeply understood the provider experience,” Patel said. “It feels like mental health providers are burned out by current options, and they have to make trade-offs that are undesirable for them.”
This understanding came largely from Legion Health’s previous focus. With that understanding in mind, the company hopes to resolve the headaches that providers and patients face in psychiatry today.
On the provider side, Patel said Legion Health has learned that the “ideal world” for providers is one where they are paid well, control their schedule, don’t have to handle back-office functions and are enabled to “provide ethical, high-quality care.” On the patient side, care delays, spotty insurance coverage, poor communication and delays in care lead to a poor patient experience.
“All those problems point to a growing and still very large problem in the outpatient psychiatry space that we had the expertise around on the supply side, on the provider side, to really create a model that would be attractive for providers,” Patel said.
The round didn’t have a true lead investor, according to Patel. It included several institutional investors, including Alumni Ventures, Y Combinator, Acequia Capital and Soma Capital. Its angel investors include some that are already known in the digital behavioral health space. These include Dr. Ravi Shah (former chief medical officer at Geode Health), Erica Johnson (co-founder at Modern Health) and Jay Desai (founder and ex-CEO at PatientPing).
Previously, the company had raised $2 million.
On the tech side of things, Patel said the company’s AI systems can read and use any piece of information that a human would be able to read. That would include chart notes, patient communications and intake documentation, for example.
Large language models (LLMs) at use in Legion Health can read a patient’s data and find and recommend the best time for a patient to set up an appointment. This recommendation would be based on previous appointments held, the patient’s expressed desirable timeframe and the provider’s prescribed frequency of visits. In turn, that information would then communicate with another AI tool to automatically book that appointment.
“Scheduling is a notoriously difficult, hairy problem in the mental health space that is a big enough problem that it impacts clinical outcomes,” Patel said.
The company also uses intake documentation and patient communications to risk score patients and then prioritize patients that have the most complex or severe needs. Often, the most complex patients require the most attention but can be hard to identify in real time from old-school chart reviews.
Legion Health also focuses on operating in network with payers. Patel estimates that the company is in-network for 99% of patients in Texas with commercial or ACA exchange individual health plans. The goal is to expand to all major government payer programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare Advantage and TRICARE.
Including its partnership with payers, Legion Health takes self-referrals and works with other organizations that have obligations over people’s health.
“The AI is not just a cool thing to do; it’s really meaningfully creating a margin profile for the business to allow us to treat populations that haven’t been treated before and to ensure high quality care at scale,” Patel said.
Companies featured in this article:
Acequia Capital, Alumni Ventures, Legion Health, Soma Capital, Y Combinator