Digital mental health company Headspace and employer health tech company Virgin Pulse have announced an extended partnership in which Virgin's members will have full access to Headspace within its AI-enabled health and wellbeing platform.

Headspace will be fully integrated into Virgin Pulse's Homebase for Health platform, providing Virgin's employer, health plan and health system members access to Headspace's psychiatry, therapy, clinical care, self-guided care, behavioral health coaching and employee assistance program services.

The offering goes beyond the already established partnership in which Headspace was available to Virgin Pulse clients via its partner ecosystem. 

Headspace's offerings will also be available to Virgin Pulse's approximately 2,000 employees globally. 

"Deepening the Headspace and Virgin Pulse offerings, including adding Headspace full replacement EAP, allows a more seamless and engaging mental health benefit for employers and health plans to offer. Our combined and highly aligned set of services brings together physical and mental healthcare in a powerful and engaging platform through Virgin Pulse," Katie DiPerna Cook, senior vice president of partnerships at Headspace, told MobiHealthNews in an email. 

THE LARGER TREND

In May, Virgin Pulse announced it expanded its Homebase for Health platform to include AI-enabled personalized workforce wellbeing tools, which create a 360-view of populations, generate millions of insights each minute and expand social determinants of health data. 

The database also allows Virgin to find the member's data doppelganger, a virtual representation of the member. The company can then fill in gaps about the member, using data twinning to help the system prepare for and react to a member's needs. 

Researchers say the emergence of digital twin technology in healthcare can have many benefits, including real-time monitoring, precise disease treatment options and dynamic analysis. However, the effectiveness of the technology can depend on the accuracy of the simulation and socio-ethical risks can exist for its use in healthcare, including reduced privacy. 

Another company using digital twins in healthcare is clinical trial tech company Unlearn.ai, which uses machine learning to create digital twins of randomized controlled trial participants. The startup pitches this tech as a way to run smaller clinical trials more quickly since researchers don't need to find as many participants for the control group. 

Unlearn.ai scored $50 million in Series B financing in 2022. In March, the company announced it added Mira Murati, chief technology officer at Microsoft-backed OpenAI, to its board of directors.