The integration of physical and behavioral health services is increasingly becoming a priority for health insurance companies, employers and providers. And yet, behavioral health has been siloed from the rest of the healthcare world for so long. However, there are many revolutionary organizations changing that, and Vida Health is one of them. Vida Health addresses chronic and co-occurring physical and behavioral health conditions. They are integrating care by treating the whole person and have measurable results of its success.

This week, I talked to Stephanie Tilenius, Founder & CEO of Vida Health, about their polychronic design and strong outcomes. You can read our conversation below.

So, Vida is polychronic by design. What does that mean, and why is that important in this day and age?

Basically, we believe that point solutions miss the point. Nobody wants to switch between three different programs on three different apps to manage their obesity, depression, and diabetes. We built Vida from the ground up to manage multiple chronic conditions simultaneously. We do this with a balance of machine learning that personalizes each person’s treatment as well as the human connection of real life therapists, health coaches, and providers who bring the empathy and accountability people need to reach their goals. We think it’s always been important to treat the whole person, not just the symptom, but it’s especially important today because nearly half of Americans have more than one chronic health condition and in order to successfully treat them, you need to not only address the full range of conditions they have but also the behavioral conditions – the stress, the habits, and often the depression and anxiety – that accompany and fuel these health conditions.

You have some exciting new announcements, including one with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois. Tell us more!

Yeah! We have so many exciting things happening right now. BCBSIL is certainly one of them — in July we announced that we joined Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois’ network as their only on-demand 100% virtual mental health therapy and coaching practice. Going in-network is something we’ve thought about for a while and when the BCBSIL opportunity arose we knew it was a great fit both for us and for BCBSIL’s nearly 6 million covered lives. Some other exciting announcements for us are the Validation Institute reports that confirmed health improvement and cost savings for our diabetes and therapy programs, new partnerships with Humana, as well as a program that serves Kentucky’s Medicaid population. As with most virtual health companies these days there’s a lot going on so really no shortage of things that I’m excited about.

Health plans and employers are expecting strong outcomes of behavioral health vendors more than ever. What is Vida's approach to demonstrating outcomes?

Vida rigorously tracks our clinical outcomes and we stand by our claim that we have some of the best outcomes in the industry across mental and physical health. As for how we demonstrate outcomes to our clients — for both our health plan and employer clients we provide comprehensive reporting that spans enrollment, engagement and outcomes. Some clients also provide claims data, which allows us to do claim-based measures like medication adherence and total cost analysis. We also publish our outcomes in peer-reviewed journals, we have more than 15 publications and case studies that demonstrate our outcomes across our programs. Ultimately we’re so confident in our ability to get meaningful outcomes we put participation fees at risk if mental health outcomes aren’t achieved for the population.

You can check out our video library for more discussion on Vida’s virtual continuous care model and measurable results here.