headspace health has disclosed two acquisitions this year, the latest earlier this month when the digital mental health company announced the Shine mental wellness app purchase.
In a crowded field mental health startup, the company is using acquisitions to augment its product and add new capabilities. Leslie Witt, director of product and design at Headspace, said the deal with Shine is part of a larger effort to offer content that meets the needs of more groups, including people of color, women and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Headspace Health also Sayana picked up, maker of AI-enabled sleep and mental health tracking apps. And Headspace itself is the result of a merger between the meditation app Headspace and the virtual mental health company Ginger, which closed almost a year ago.
Witt sat with MobiHealthNews to discuss the company’s acquisition strategy, how its offering may change in the future, and what’s next for the competitive digital mental health industry.
MobiHealthNews: So this wasn’t Headspace’s first acquisition this year. How do you choose your acquisition targets? Do you think you will continue at a similar rate?
Leslie Witt: I think that, as I’m sure you’re seeing, the long-rumored consolidation of the areas of mental health and behavioral health is starting to happen. Somehow, most of our story that merges with that is the merger of Ginger and Headspace proper.
But we see many opportunities through three lenses. Most of the acquisitions we’ve made, both as a combined entity and some that we’ve made separately, fit the lens of any content that aligns with our core mission and helps grow our reach from a self-service. mental health perspective, capabilities that bring new levels of technology, particularly around AI, conversation and community, and then talent.
All of these have been in the framework of small tuck-ins, where we’re not looking to keep their offering stand-alone, but instead incorporate the talent they bring to the table into our core prioritization areas, to accelerate our capacity building and then grow our libraries. of content.
NMH: You’ve been in Headspace for about two years, not long before the merger with Ginger. How has the experience changed from a product point of view?
ingenuity: I’ll share a little bit with you why I joined Headspace, which was primarily to respond to what we were hearing from our prospective members, often members who came in and then didn’t find what they needed, which was sharper mental health. services and care. And of our business buyers, they were looking at this well-loved brand, a well-known brand that was attracting 30%, 50% of their employee base to sign up and open a gateway to care.
But that front door only led so far. I fundamentally believe in the power of mindfulness and meditation tools, but they cannot meet all mental health needs. And particularly when someone is in a state of acute anxiety, acute depression, they need access to professional human services.
For Headspace, he realized straight away that we didn’t have any viable, quick paths to follow without merging, and Ginger was the perfect partner to pair with. We’ve been working on that landscape of services for the last year to make sure that we can really open the front door to take care of everyone. That we can know who you are, what you need, assess your goals, classify you in a personalized way for the right type of transfer of care, for the right start. And putting you on a path where we’re really laying out the dimensions of a lifelong mental health journey, helping you develop habits of practice that give you a deeper capacity for self-care that you can then scale up when the need arises.
NMH: What are some of your goals for changing your offering in the future?
ingenuity: One is personalization, not only of services, but also of measurement and outcome, so that we can continually be in a cycle of learning and improvement where we understand what you need from the start, serve the right thing, assess if that really did or didn’t work for you, and do it both individually and as a group.
We are building what I often call the middle piece, the bridge between the self-service content in the Headspace app and the text-based training, teletherapy and telepsychiatry of the Ginger service.
To really focus on more clinical content and programmatic content, we’ve launched a stress program. It’s a 30-day program that truly takes you in a clinical and behavioral science-backed way from an introduction to stress reduction to a stress reduction habit and practice. We’re doing the same thing with anxiety and sleep, and we see a lot of potential to start hybridizing the interplay between training and that human level of support into the core product itself.
And then last but not least, I think we have a lot of opportunities around the community. We see people almost engaging in cohort-based ways in certain content areas. [For example,] we see people coming to Headspace in times of dealing with infertility and we see a lot of potential and desire to start linking community and peer-based support.
NMH: There are a lot of digital mental health companies out there right now, and you mentioned earlier that we may be at the start of a combined wave. How do you think space will change in general this year?
ingenuity: Some of the ways I see the game changing is that we’re going back, in very good ways, to some of our pre-COVID norms. And with that, I think there’s a lot of pressure on [figuring out] what is the persistence, the relevance of telehealth.
What we generally find is that of all the telehealth services, the ones that are most persistent in a digitally delivered format are actually behavioral health.
We’re starting to lean toward addressing some of that adolescent mental health crisis. I think that is under-addressed at the moment. And as a mother of 11-year-old twins who sees what happens within that landscape, there needs to be more participants in this space. And we must celebrate those who have already been there and ensure that its capacity and access continue to expand for all.
We’re also seeing where companies played an outsized role in leaning on employee access to mental health services. There is an increasing need and acceptance of the public sector. We have a relationship with Los Angeles County and see a lot of potential to partner with governments, educational institutions, and more broadly with health systems to ensure health parity and equity goals are met.
