What you should know:
– Mantra Salut, the preeminent digital mental health clinic focused on young adults, today announced a $ 22 million A-Series investment, led by VMG Partners. The round includes new investors New Market Venture Partners, Elements Health Ventures, 14W and Alumni Ventures. Recurring investors included Canaan Partners, Global Founders Capital, Baleon Capital, Western Tech Investments and City Light Capital.
– The company plans to use the proceeds of the investment to help grow its diverse network of digital mental health clinic providers, launch new clinical products and expand its insurance partnerships.
Digital mental health provider for college students
Imagine that you are a college student with a mental illness and cannot arrange counseling or treatment due to late appointments or shortage of providers. Or maybe your school only offers short-term mental health services and you need long-term care or treatment for a more serious illness such as bipolar disorder. Will you be able to overcome long waiting times without career guidance or access to medication? These are issues facing students and college counseling centers nationwide, as the pandemic and escalating mental health crisis among young adults alters the ability to provide ongoing care.
Enter Mantra Salut, a digital mental health clinic designed for colleges and universities to extend evidence-based psychiatric and teletherapy services to their students while removing common barriers that currently prevent many college students from receiving treatment and medication they need.
The Mantra platform allows campus counseling centers to refer students to their large network of board-certified providers in order to reduce waiting times, provide access to culturally competent providers (more than 50% of providers are ‘identify as BIPOC or LGBTQ +) and ensure that students do not go through the cracks by staying engaged and able to access appointments at convenient times such as at night and on weekends. Mantra launched its web-based collaborative platform in the fall of 2020, and its teletherapy and psychiatric services are now available to nearly 500,000 students on 52 campuses, including Penn State, MIT and Miami Dade College.
In addition, Mantra dedicates the revenue of this round to climbing significantly Mantra College Mental Health Provider Diversity Scholarship. The scholarship was launched in June 2021 to provide financial support to marginalized identities with a mental health degree and working in a college or university counseling center to help reduce racial disparities. the field of mental health.
“There is an urgent need to remove the barriers that exist for young adults to access culturally competent and evidence-based mental health care,” said Ed Gaussen, co-founder and CEO of Mantra Health. “With this infusion of new capital, we will focus on removing these barriers by managing more complex diagnoses, building a stronger provider network in 50 states and doubling insurance partnerships. We are also pleased to continue investing in the future of IT professionals. mental health through our diversity scholarship program to ensure that all young adults in the United States have the mental support they need to succeed at their fingertips. “
Mantra Health Insurance Reference Program
Mantra Health’s insurance benchmark program leverages its virtual provider pool and software ecosystem to enable partner schools to direct students directly to long-term care and access all the benefits the model offers. Mantra care.
Historically, when a student has needed long-term mental health care, their counselor would refer them to community providers where they typically face long waits and, worse, often drop out of treatment, when it is more important that they be seen. The Insurance Reference Program is designed to work with student insurance as a payer instead of school, the benefits of this model include:
– The digital referral route is more than twice as effective as traditional referrals to EU providers
– Students can pair with a provider of their choice from a large network of diverse providers, with care provided through the platform owned by Mantra
– Option for campus care teams to collaborate with Mantra providers through the Mantra Collaboration Portal, both for ongoing care and for the crisis
– Convenient appointment times for students at night and on weekends
– Compensate for the overall cost of the Mantra program by working with students’ health insurance plans
Mantra is already online with Optum, Cigna, and other local payers, and has launched the Pilot Insurance Reference Program at one of the largest public schools in the country in collaboration with its plan. medical insurance for students.
