The pandemic has spawned seriously negative mental health implications for people of all ages, especially children and teens. Brightline, a telehealth company that provides pediatric mental health care, was working to increase access to mental health services for children and teens before the pandemic took hold, but now the startup is gaining more attention from health systems as their emergency departments fill up with pediatric patients in increasingly acute mental health conditions.

On Tuesday, the Palo Alto-based company announced it had received a $10 million investment from Northwell Health, the largest health system in New York state, to scale its telehealth platform. The investment came as an extension to the $105 million Series C financing round Brightline announced in April. It brings the startup’s total overall funding to more than $210 million. GV (formerly Google Ventures), KKR, Oak HC/FT, Threshold and Boston Children’s Hospital are among other investors that back the company.

Brightline was founded in 2019 to help close the immense affordability and access gaps within pediatric mental health care. Most pediatric therapists in the U.S. are out-of-network and accept cash pay only, according to Brightline CEO Naomi Allen. She said there are also massive provider deserts across the country, so much so that 75% of U.S. counties don’t have a child or adolescent psychiatrist, and about half of those counties don’t have a trained pediatric therapist. 

Brightline has built a clinical care network of pediatric therapists, psychiatrists, behavioral specialists and speech-language pathologists. Its platform delivers pediatric mental health care using telehealth appointments and digital engagement modules. The startup provides a range of specialized services based on each child’s needs, and it serves kids as young as a year and a half to 18.

Once a parent signs their child up for Brightline’s platform, the family completes a questionnaire and receives a care management coach. The child will also be assigned to other clinicians, including therapists and psychiatrists, depending on their needs. The care management coach ensures that the child is progressing on their treatment path and leads them to additional resources on Brightline’s platform, such as its digital modules for anxiety, depression, trauma, ADHD, speech delays, gender exploration and autism. 

The families and caregivers of children who use the platform can also use it to discuss the child’s progress with their care team. Additionally, Brightline provides them with online educational content about how their child might be feeling and why they need to seek mental health services, as the stigma around seeking mental health care is still widely felt among some parents, according to Allen.

She said it was important that Brightline championed dyadic treatment — which refers to therapy in which children and their parents are treated together — because this type of care is “much more effective in terms of reaching clinical outcomes.” 

Brightline’s services are delivered as an in-network benefit so that users of its platform do not have to pay the full cost of pediatric health care, which is unaffordable for most families. The startup has a direct-to-consumer option as well, but most of the platform’s care is provided to families covered under Brightline’s health plan partners — which include Aetna, Competitive Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Blue Shield of California.

Recently, the company has “come into the spotlight with a number of hospital systems,” Allen declared. She said these health systems come to her looking for ways to address the massive increases they are seeing in pediatric and adolescent anxiety, depression and suicide attempts. 

“Health systems are seeing this massive influx of demand and utilization in the emergency room because when kids don’t have access to care, their condition becomes more and more acute,” Allen said.

When Northwell made its investment in Brightline, it did so with the intent of becoming a strategic partner that refers its patients to the platform, Allen said.  Brightline is still in the beginning stages of determining what its partnership will look like, but the two entities’ goal is to increase access to pediatric care — especially preventive care — so that families don’t have to sit on months-long waitlists for their child to receive care. 

Northwell will also receive valuable data from Brightline in terms of which telehealth models work best among pediatric mental health patients and how their clinical outcomes progress over time. Brightline serves more than 50 employers and covers more than 24 million health plan lives. Due to its scale, Allen said the company is “sitting on the first national set of data around clinical outcomes for pediatric mental health patients.”

But Brightline isn’t the only mental health startup garnering attention during the mental health crisis. The uptick in mental health concerns during the pandemic has led to investment in various virtual mental health care platforms, such as Frame, TheraTalk and Starling Minds. But Brightline is the only nationally scaled platform that has a pediatric focus, according to Allen.

Photo: metamorworks, Getty Images