Two Chairs, a hybrid psychotherapy provider, is expanding into 19 new states with the goal of reaching millions of Americans.
The expansion, which should be complete this summer, includes Texas, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Michigan, and will be virtual to start. Brick-and-mortars may be stood up as needed. More than 95% of Two Chairs patients engage with their visits virtually today.
The company is also partnering with regional and national payers to offer in-network services. It did not disclose new partners, but existing partners include Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Kaiser Permanente Washington, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida and Aetna.
“Scaling exceptional quality healthcare services… is extraordinarily difficult,” Alex Katz, founder and CEO of Two Chairs, told Fierce Healthcare. “We feel ready for it.”
The news follows Two Chairs’ $72M series C fundraising last year. To prepare for the expansion, Two Chairs has added new clinicians to its team, including some who are cross-licensed to treat in multiple states. To date, the company has focused on building its presence in California, Florida and Washington, where it also has in-person clinics. Its goal was to first achieve real outcomes before expanding, prioritizing its clinical infrastructure, therapist-matching model and measurement-based care protocols.
Key to Two Chairs’ approach is its commitment to measurement-based care. Fewer than 20% of therapists across the U.S. use this practice, despite it widely being considered the gold standard. Two Chairs collects patient-reported outcomes data on nearly all patients and does so 94% of the time before every appointment. It also offers dashboards for providers and patients to help visualize treatment progress.
“The median quality of therapy in this country is not good,” Katz said. “It is not aligned with the research, with evidence-based practice. It’s not utilizing measurement-based care.”
Company executives also say having a full-time team of W2-employed therapists is crucial to being able to invest deeply in clinical programming and technology that helps drive outcomes. “The only way we believe we can do that is a W2 model because we can require our clinicians to attend trainings, to adjust their clinical approach,” Colleen Marshall, LMFT, chief clinical officer at Two Chairs, previously told Fierce Healthcare.
This structure also helps Two Chairs providers see higher-acuity patients. Most commonly, the company treats mild to moderate presentations. But it also sees patients with comorbidities or suicidal ideation, Katz said. Two Chairs is able to take on higher-acuity cases because its therapists, overseen by a clinical manager, attend specialty consult groups weekly. They are surrounded by care navigators, risk programs that triage patients into care pathways, crisis services and referrals to psychiatrists as needed.
“All of these things add up to our ability to handle more acuity, more complexity, than the typical private practice,” Katz said.
Despite leaning into tech like AI, Two Chairs also aims to preserve a human-centered approach in its operations. For instance, though other companies also offer therapist-patient matching, Two Chairs ensures a human is in the loop throughout the process. Patients start with a matchmaking consult and clinical assessment, led by a therapist. Only after that does the patient’s information get run through an algorithm to make the match. This approach has meant that 98% of Two Chairs patients say they are with the right therapist for them, Katz said.