Dr. Ramtekkar was drawn to LifeStance for its scale, service offerings and potential. The company currently operates more than 550 clinics with a presence in 33 states, covering almost 90% of the U.S. population.
“LifeStance is very strategically positioned to address some of the mental health crises that the country is dealing with right now,” Dr. Ramtekkar told Becker’s. “And so the current plans to really align with that strategy are very multifaceted.”
There are a few key factors in success as a mental healthcare provider, both from a clinical and entrepreneurial perspective.
“No. 1 is access. Sometimes, delayed care is denied care,” Dr. Ramtekkar said. “We already do much better than many competitors in the market, but allowing timely access is a significant priority.”
Dr. Ramtekkar’s next focus is on patient engagement, which entails ensuring patients receive the care they need. However, engagement can be a challenge due delays in follow-up care or issues with ease of care access.
“Our goal is to make sure that we design our care pathways in a way that helps individuals stay engaged to get the maximum benefit from treatment.”
The next key tenet in LifeStance’s care philosophy and entrepreneurial focus is care personalization.
“We cannot really have a one-size-fits-all approach because when we have one person with a particular diagnosis, it is very contextual, dependent on whatever is happening in their life. We focus on understanding all the ages and stages of life so that we can design our treatments to personalize and contextualize them,” Dr. Ramtekkar explained.
However, prioritizing convenience does not mean sacrificing care quality.
“We are really rooted in the fact that the overall clinical experience, the quality of the clinicians that they are matched with and the evidence-based treatment that they receive. All of that should be of high quality,” Dr. Ramtekkar said. “Access, engagement, personalization are of no use if the actual quality of care is not good. And I’m proud to say that we already do that, but we are just trying to properly quantify, measure and talk about it.”
Dr. Ramtekkar said the final piece of the puzzle is outcomes.
“Just receiving care is not enough. Are [the patients]getting better? Are the objective scores for their depression or anxiety or any other diagnosis getting better? How’s their quality of life? Are they feeling better? And it’s not just the numbers. One of the challenges in the field of mental health is we don’t really have a blood test or a brain scan to say whether your infection is better or your pathology is done. It is still fairly subjective, but there is a well-established framework for measurement. So we are implementing all of that for proper outcome measurement that will drive, again, the access to engagement and the quality for the individuals that we serve.”
Dr. Ramtekkar remains confident that LifeStance’s market growth will not taper out in 2024.
“We truly are the differentiator when it comes to mental healthcare.”