Pelago, a virtual substance use care provider, launched the Pelago Behavioral Health Platform on Tuesday at the Behavioral Health Tech conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The platform unifies substance use, mental health and behavioral addiction care in one place.
New York City-based Pelago offers treatment for substance use like drinking or prescription pain medication, as well as mental health conditions like stress and anxiety. It also treats patients battling habits like gambling or gaming. The company serves both employers and payers.
Now, the Pelago Behavioral Health Platform allows Pelago’s customers to manage substance use, mental health and behavioral addiction care under one contract and one member record. This allows the company to better treat co-occurring conditions. About half of Pelago’s patients battle co-occurring depression and anxiety, according to Dr. Yusuf Sherwani, CEO and co-founder of Pelago.
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Each patient starts with Pelago’s clinical AI tool called Sona, which functions as a front door and assesses what kind of care the patient needs and directs them to the right level of treatment. It then continues with the patient under clinical supervision.
“[Sona is] a voice experience which is really designed to do a clinical assessment and triage people into the right care pathway,” Sherwani said in an interview. “If they’re super low acuity, they’re just offered the ability to continue their support through Sona, where they can speak to it whenever they want, and it can actually take them through a really clinically-valid cognitive behavioral therapy program. But if they do meet the diagnostic criteria as measured by the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, then they can elect to speak with a provider, a clinician from the Pelago care team, and work in conjunction with Sona and a clinician to support their care.”
Pelago introduced Sona this summer. Two observational studies that analyzed more than 9,000 member conversations found that patients reported 20% to 25% fewer poor mental health days each month.
The launch of the Pelago Behavioral Health Platform comes as behavioral health spending is on the rise and is a major concern for employers. Sherwani said this platform can help reduce costs by directing low-acuity care to AI and reserving clinicians for higher-acuity needs.
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“Our goal two to three years from today is that we’ve been able to maintain and even improve access to behavioral health, but we’ve been able to do so in a way that we’ve actually made mental health cost deflationary in the same way that we’ve done in substance use care. … It’s like how do we actually give everyone access to mental health, but do so in a way that’s way more sustainable and reduces overall healthcare burden?” he said.
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