Digital mental health platform Cerebral announced it acquired fellow New York-based behavioral health organization Resilience Lab.
Cerebral, launched in 2020, is a telehealth company that connects users with a licensed psychiatrist for individual and couples therapy. The company also offers medication services, and patients can obtain a personalized treatment plan with lifestyle recommendations, if recommended.
Resilience Lab is an online mental healthcare platform that connects patients with therapists who specialize in depression, anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, OCD and other concerns.
The company also offers Resilience Institute, a clinician education platform for providers to improve their skills and stay up to date on best practices in psychotherapeutic treatment. It provides workshops, fireside chats, live recording training sessions and CE courses.
"Resilience Lab is excited to be joining forces with the Cerebral team to move the industry from providing access to delivering consistent, high-quality care with measurable, long-term patient improvement," Marc Goldberg, cofounder of Resilience Lab and president at Cerebral, said in a statement.
The companies will integrate into one platform, and Cerebral will invest in scaling Resilience Lab's infrastructure. The combined companies will operate under the Cerebral brand.
Christine Carville, cofounder of Resilience Lab and chief clinical officer at Cerebral, added: "Our clinician development model was developed by clinicians for clinicians, and is focused both on therapists and on prescribers. By investing deeply in early-career therapists – through supervision, training and measurement-informed care – we ensure higher quality, consistent outcomes."
THE LARGER TREND
Last year, Resilience Lab acquired online psychiatric medication management platform Options MD, allowing the behavioral health company to offer integrated prescription management and psychotherapy services for moderate to severe mental illness.
Options MD's medication management and psychotherapy offerings were integrated into Resilience Lab's platform, giving patients with severe mental illness access to specialized clinicians for medication management.
Resilience also integrated Options' proprietary clinical intake and AI decision support platform into its offerings. That provided its therapists with AI-enabled diagnosis and treatment recommendations to help them create an effective care plan.
In May, the Federal Trade Commission announced that more than 400,000 people would receive a refund check as a result of the FTC's settlement with Cerebral pertaining to the company allegedly billing consumers despite their requests to cancel their subscriptions.
The refunds stemmed from a settlement of FTC allegations that the company "required its clients to go through a complex, multi-step and often multi-day process to cancel their subscriptions."
The FTC alleged that Cerebral continued to charge consumers while taking its time to address cancellation requests. The Commission also alleged that the company disclosed consumers' sensitive personal health information and other data to third parties for advertising purposes.
The FTC additionally claimed that the company violated the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act by failing to clearly communicate its cancellation policies before charging consumers.
In 2022, the WSJ reported the Federal Trade Commission was investigating whether Cerebral was involved in deceptive or unfair marketing or advertising practices.
In 2023, bipartisan senators sent letters to Cerebral, along with two other digital health companies, expressing concerns over the providers' data-sharing practices and urged the companies to protect users' healthcare data better.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Susan Collins (R-Me.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wa.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) expressed concerns that the companies are "tracking and sharing sensitive and personally-identifiable health data with third-party social media and online search platforms such as Google and Facebook that monetize this data to target advertisements," citing a report from STAT and The Markup.
The senators asked for clarity about the digital health companies' data-sharing practices and requested a complete list of questions users are asked on each platform. They also asked for a list of third parties who have accessed information that could be identified with a single user.
In 2022, Cerebral received a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York for possible violations of the Controlled Substances Act over its prescribing practices for medications like Adderall.
The company subsequently ousted cofounder and former CEO Kyle Robertson amid growing controversy over its prescribing practices, particularly for controlled substances.
Around the same time, Cerebral said it would pause the prescription of controlled substances to new patients and then subsequently confirmed it would stop prescribing most controlled substances to both new and existing patients, though it would continue offering medication for opioid use disorder treatment.
That same year, Cerebral sued Robertson, alleging he never repaid a nearly $50 million loan received from the digital mental health company.
Former Cerebral executive Matthew Truebe also sued Cerebral in 2022, alleging he was fired after voicing concerns about unethical prescribing practices and patient safety issues.
