Mental and behavioral health video visit company Regroup Therapy has raised $1.8 million in a round led by Hyde Park Angels with participation from OCA Ventures, Impact Engine, New Stack Ventures, Wasson Enterprise, and MD Angels.

Regroup Therapy CEO David Cohn said he had been interested in the field of behavioral health since high school, in part, because the services had helped him personally. But after a stint working for the Peace Corps, Cohn said he realized the grassroots work wasn’t for him and instead joined a management consulting firm to work for C-level IT executives.

“What I really liked about that was I got to see these CIOs build big processes,” he said. “They flip a switch and it would touch thousands of people in many different places at once and it just felt so scalable and impactful.”

He began work on Regroup Therapy with the same idea. Hospitals and health systems can use Regroup Therapy’s offering to connect their patients with psychiatrists, social workers, and mental health professionals remotely via video visits.

“The best way to think about us is as a staffing agency for health entities that provide healthcare services, but are unable to hire in the capacities that they need on the behavioral health side,” Cohn explained. “What you see is a really deep shortage of mental health providers across the country. Say you’re a chain of primary care clinics. You know that you have to bring behavioral health services in to effectively treat your patients, but you can’t. What they would do is they would come to us, and we would bring them people, technology, workflows, and processes — basically put digital providers on their local care teams.”

When a patient goes to see their primary care provider and the provider detects there’s a need for behavioral or mental health care, instead of writing a paper referral, they can immediately connect the person with a remote therapist in another exam room. The mental healthcare provider will review the patient’s EMR and record notes in the patient’s existing chart.

After launching in early 2015, the company already has a number of customer contracts, including deals with Chicago-based Sinai Health System, Oak Street Health, the OSF HealthCare, and MetroFamily Services.

“We are going to be doing a significant amount of revenue, I’d say no less than half million in revenue this year,” Cohn said.

Cohn added that one of Regroup Therapy’s goals is to eradicate the mental health provider shortage issue and build out a service that is in many ways superior to the options that people have when there are in-person providers available in their region. 

“We never want to supplant existing providers, but I think there are ways we can work with them to make the work even better,” Cohn said. “We are already experimenting with things like facial recognition to start to get a proxy on outcomes. We are looking at better way to do data analytics services so that you really know who in your population needs access to this care and what happens to them after they leave the office. There’s a lot that we can do and a big push for us -- especially in value based systems -- will be the self management of patients. There’s a lot we can do with automating some parts of the therapeutic process.”