Iris Telehealth, a virtual-first behavioral health company, has launched two new technology-driven solutions, its new Virtual Clinic and back-end AI assistant, Iris Insights.
The behavioral health managed services organization works with healthcare provides to enhance the behavioral healthcare departments of the largest and smallest clinics, from entire health systems down to community mental health clinics, the company said.
Iris Telehealth says its creating a national standard for the provision of behavioral healthcare, which is highly variable practice to practice, based on the company’s experience since 2013 in hundreds of clinics serving millions of patients.
“We do everything for federally qualified health centers, community mental health centers and health systems, recruiting, licensing, credentialing, technology, support, navigation, scheduling, and of course, we deliver care,” CEO Andy Flanagan told Fierce Healthcare.
The behavioral healthcare delivery company will now offer its customers a virtual “command center”—Iris Insights—that can easily guide the company to deliver efficient, high-quality, best-in-practice behavioral healthcare.
The solution can offer financial results in real time, increases scheduling efficiency by 90% and assigns patients a risk score for escalation, according to the company.
Iris Insights is embedded into the company’s new Virtual Clinic.
“You kind of … just get [the solution] in a box, right? That's the goal, to make it easy to figure out how to run your business, which is hard. Reimbursements are low in behavioral health, so you need to be super-efficient. And our job is to make every one of our partners as efficient as the very best run group in the country. That's really our job,” Flanagan said.
Iris has 430 mental healthcare providers on staff to provide emergency psychiatry services and lower acuity therapy.
The company also can help healthcare delivery organizations with provider credentialing, scheduling, referral management and integration with primary care, among others. Iris helps healthcare organizations optimize their workforce and manage behavioral health utilization. The company secured $40 million in series B funding in April 2022.
Flanagan said that many practices struggle to run efficient behavioral healthcare departments.
“This isn't like cancer or pediatrics for diabetes, where there's a standard, you know, there are very few data points in behavioral health," Flanagan said. "It's not like blood glucose levels or something of the metric that you can grab onto. We found that some of the largest entities also struggled to be the most efficient, and some of the smallest entities were incredibly efficient because they they had to be. But we wanted to level the field.”
Iris Insights has been deployed over the last twelve months with 17 partners, representing over 200 facilities.
The company will also be releasing monthly content for Iris Insights, like new APIs.