Q&A: How Headspace Health’s acquisitions alter its mental health product (MobiHealthNews):
Headspace Health has revealed two acquisitions this year, the latest coming earlier this month when the digital mental health company announced the purchase of mental wellness app Shine.
In a crowded field of mental health startups, the company is using acquisitions to augment its product and add new capabilities … Headspace Health also scooped up Sayana, maker of AI-enabled mental health-tracking and sleep apps. And Headspace itself is the result of a merger between meditation app Headspace and virtual mental healthcare company Ginger, which closed nearly a year ago.
MobiHealthNews: You’ve been at Headspace for about two years, not too long before the merger with Ginger. How has the experience changed from the product point of view?
Leslie Witt, Headspace Health’s chief product and design officer: … I fundamentally believe in the power of mindfulness and meditation tools, but they can’t serve all mental health needs. And particularly when someone’s in a state of acute anxiety, acute depression, they need access to professional, human services.
For Headspace, it led to a direct realization that we had no viable and fast paths forward without merging, and Ginger was the perfect partner to pair with. We’ve been working across that landscape of services for the last year to ensure that we truly can open the front door to care for all. That we can learn who you are, what you need, assess your goals, triage you in a personalized capacity to the right kind of handoff of care, to the right beginning. And get you on a path where we’re really establishing the dimensions of a lifelong mental health journey, helping you build habits of practice that give you deeper self-care capability that then can scale up when the need occurs..
We are building out what I often call the middle piece, the bridge that exists between the self-serve content in the Headspace app and the text-based coaching, teletherapy and telepsychiatry of the Ginger service.
And then, last but not least, I think we have a lot of opportunity around community. We see folks almost engaging in kind of cohort-based ways around certain areas of content.
News in Context:
- Headspace and Ginger merge to expand and scale up digital mental health
- Meditation app Headspace raises $93 million in equity and debt to accelerate clinical validation and geographic expansion
- The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) shares discussion paper to help empower 8 billion minds via the ethical adoption of digital mental health and neurotech