Top Behavioral Health Stories of 2023: Bankruptcies, ‘Ghost Networks’ Shake the Industry

2023 has been a tumultuous year for the behavioral health space. Macroeconomic headwinds, including rising interest rates plus unrest in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, has slowed dealmaking. Additionally, many providers have struggled to raise more capital as investors tighten their purse strings. At least two major companies in behavioral health care have filed […]

Teladoc’s Behavioral Health Business BetterHelp ‘Decelerated’ After Period of Hyper-Growth

Teladoc’s direct-to-consumer behavioral health service, BetterHelp, has ‘decelerated’ coming off multiple years of hypergrowth. The organization is now focusing on balancing top-line growth, bottom-line growth, and cash flow. “After scaling rapidly to surpass a billion dollars of revenue last year. We have since taken a more balanced approach to growth and margin at BetterHelp,” Mala […]

Teladoc Doubles Down on Therapist Productivity Improvements, AI to Drive Efficiencies for BetterHelp

Teladoc Health (NYSE: TDOC) is attributing its direct-to-consumer mental health business BetterHelp’s strong revenue growth to therapist productivity improvements. The efficiencies include more group therapy sessions and an emphasis on more digital interactions. “We’ve actually taken a number of initiatives to improve therapists productivity, ranging from group therapy sessions, to more digital interactions,” Mala Murthy, […]

Teladoc’s BetterHelp Gets Boost From Customer-Acquisition Costs Stabilizing

Teladoc (NYSE: TDOC) attributed its direct-to-consumer mental health segment BetterHelp’s first-quarter revenue growth to an uptick in membership and stable customer-acquisition costs. In 2022, the telehealth provider struggled to keep up with the rising customer-acquisition costs, which were partly inflated by new digital behavioral health competitors. “Customer acquisition trends have remained stable year to date, […]

BetterHelp Pays $7.8M in FTC Settlement, Agrees to Stop Sharing Patient Data for Advertising

The Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday that it intends to ban BetterHelp from data sharing for advertising purposes. The regulatory body further calls BetterHelp to pay $7.8 million to consumers as a part of a settlement over allegations it shared sensitive health information with third parties such as social media platforms and digital advertisers. The […]

Teladoc’s BetterHelp Comes Back Down to Earth After Years of ‘Hyper-Growth’

After two years of “hyper-growth,” Teladoc (NYSE: TDOC) expects gains in its B2C behavioral health product, BetterHelp, to slow. In Q4, BetterHelp revenue grew by 29% year over year, raking in $277 million. Overall, that made up, more than 40% of Teladoc’s consolidated revenue of $638 million. BetterHelp business had an adjusted EBITDA of $53 […]

BetterHelp Rakes in $1B in 2022, as Teladoc Plans to Integrate Behavioral Health into Its Chronic Care Strategy

Despite a somewhat rocky 2022, Teladoc Health Inc.’s (NYSE: TDOC) direct-to-consumer behavioral health subsidiary, BetterHelp, raked in over $1 billion in revenue. That’s a $300 million increase from 2021, according to company leadership. More than 1 million people received therapy from BetterHelp in 2022, Teladoc CEO Jason Gorevic revealed at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference […]

Top 10 Behavioral Health Stories of 2022: How ABA Layoffs, Value-Based Care and Dealmaking Defined the Year

The year 2022 saw several growing pains and tough lessons in the behavioral health industry. Two years after the onset of a world-altering pandemic, the behavioral health industry saw adjustments and reactions to a lot of new developments. The industry did so while grappling with several of its chronic headaches such as workforce shortages and […]

What Traditional Behavioral Health Operators Can Teach Startups About Curbing Customer Acquisition Costs

A lot is riding on whether or not digital behavioral health operators will be able to solve the challenge of high customer acquisition costs. Last year, investors poured $5.5 billion of capital into digital operators’ coffers.  Yet high customer acquisition costs remain a largely unresolved concern that could limit digital behavioral health’s promise of speeding […]

Teladoc’s BetterHelp Sees Active User Rate, App Downloads Skyrocket

Despite Teladoc’s (NYSE: TDOC) rocky earnings reports, its mental health subsidiary BetterHelp has seen its number of active users skyrocket this year. In March of 2022, BetterHelp had just under 200,000 active users; that number has risen to nearly 350,000, according to a chart from investment research firm Hedgeye. The number of downloads has also […]