UPMC Backs $17 Million Funding Round For Lantern To Provide Digital Mental Health Services
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The funding marks the largest round to date in the emerging digital mental health wellness space.
Pittsburgh, PA-based healthcare giant UMPC recently announced the close of a $17 million investment round designed to fund evidence-based online mental health wellness services provider Lantern. The investment was part of an ongoing commitment by the two forces to transform the way emotional wellbeing services are delivered and accessed across the United States.UPMC will work with Lantern to develop the firm’s online emotional wellness services and products, leveraging them within an array of clinical settings and conditions.
Lantern is a San Francisco-based startup with 17 employees founded in 2012. Previous investors Mayfield Fund, SoftTech Venture Capital, and Stanford University all contributed to this current funding round as well, according to Healthcare IT News.
The partnership also underscores UPMC’s commitment to commercialize solutions in four areas: Clinical tools that transform care delivery, population health management, patient-centered healthcare, and increased business efficiencies.
“We are excited about reaching more people with behavioral health issues through this readily accessible, scalable, and cost-effective platform,” Tal Heppenstall, president of UPMC Enterprises, the commercialization arm of UPMC, which spearheaded this investment, said in a company statement. “This partnership is an excellent example of our mission at UPMC Enterprises: finding creative solutions and technologies to solve some of the most challenging problems in healthcare.”
According to Alejandro Foung, Lantern co-founder and CEO, “UPMC has a unique view into the continuum of care, from insuring more than 2.8 million individuals, to administering care preventatively and when patients need it most through its more than 20 hospitals and 3,500 employed physicians.
“A large part of UPMC’s appeal to Lantern is its focus on disease prevention, a sharp contrast to the fee-for-service model that currently dominates the behavioral health landscape. Because of our shared focus on prevention to solve health challenges before they even arise or manifest, Lantern and UPMC are the perfect match.”
According to UPMC, behavioral health problems affect more than 18 percent of adults and are among the most pressing health issues currently facing the country. Depression and anxiety disorders are among the top five drivers of medical costs in primary care settings and have higher rates among those with chronic medical conditions. As a result of the current shortage of mental health workers, two-thirds of primary care physicians report difficulty referring patients to behavioral health services.
Thanks to this recent funding round, UPMC clinicians will collaborate with Lantern on pilots aimed at expanding its programs. “Integrating behavioral health into broader medical care and focusing on prevention for large groups of patients is the only way that we can deliver high-quality, cost-effective mental healthcare,” said Eva Szigethy, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry, pediatrics, and medicine at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who will be working closely with the Lantern team.