Lyra Health ramps up focus on workplace mental health with new services for HR leaders, managers

Employers are ramping up efforts to support workers' mental health as the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated stress, anxiety and depression. At the same time, the U.S. faces a shortage of mental health providers and many companies struggle to find ways to help their workforces.

"Employees are pretty much demanding at this point that mental health be prioritized as part of the corporate culture. But that's a problem for human resources leaders because only 48% of companies believe that HR is prepared to manage that kind of workforce transformation that puts mental health front and center of a work culture," Joe Grasso, Ph.D., Lyra Health’s senior director of workforce transformation, told Fierce Healthcare. 

HR teams often don't include clinicians and human resources professionals aren't trained in mental health.

"Mental health has never been more important and employees have never put greater emphasis on the topic until now, but employers are not super well positioned to meet those needs," said Grasso, a clinical psychologist by training.

Lyra Health, a provider of mental health benefits for employees, is among a crop of startups that have focused on expanding access to mental health care for employees at an individual level.

The Burlingame, California-based company provides an array of in-person and virtual behavioral health benefits to more than 1,500 leading companies and serves more than 10 million members around the world.

To better support employers at an organizational level, the company rolled out new services to offer managers and teams data insights, workplace advisory services and a multi-modal approach to learning to increase mental health literacy.

"We're ramping up organizational solutions to support mental health at the population level, not just at the individual care level," Grasso said.

According to the World Health Organization, nearly 1 billion people worldwide suffer from a mental health disorder. Recent data shows that 91% of job seekers believe that the company’s culture should support mental health. According to a June 2020 survey, 4 in 10 adults suffer from at least one mental or behavioral health condition, double the pre-pandemic rate, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported.

Lyra Health's new tools and services, part of its new workforce transformation suite, includes Lyra Learn, an on-demand, e-learning platform with interactive courses, Lyra Gather for expert-facilitated, small-group peer discussions that promote social learning and community building in a safe space and Lyra Workshops, which offer live expert instruction designed to increase mental health literacy and help employees build skills in key areas like stress and resilience or trauma and distress.

Lyra developed a workplace wellness dashboard that uses anonymized, aggregated data to provide near real-time insights into care utilization and issues related to employee mental wellness. 

The company also now offers workplace advisory services to offer benefits leaders direct support from Lyra experts in clinical and organizational psychology. 

"We want to be data-driven in how we support HR and employers by giving them insights into the types of reasons why people are seeking care so they can better tailor their internal communications and their internal programming to reach those people who are dealing with issues that are common in their workforce," Grasso said.

"We then want to pair that with consultation from experts. We developed our advisory services so that employers can have real-time conversations with clinicians and subject matter experts on things like organizational development to ensure that they're getting good counsel on how to incorporate mental health throughout the organization, throughout their communications and throughout their management practices or policies," he noted.

Lyra's eLearning platform contains more than 150 short-form videos and interactive exercises. HR leaders and managers can assign content to entire workforces or to specific departments or teams to ensure that employees gain valuable new skills for supporting themselves and one another in workplace mental wellness.

"This gives an employer the ability to deploy training at scale about workforce mental health and make it a requirement," Grasso said.

“For far too long, organizational mental health support has focused on workplace perks and short-term fixes,” he said. These organizational solutions help to identify areas of need, upskill managers, reduce stigma and empower employees to prioritize their wellness over the long term.

There are three groups of employees who often get overlooked when it comes to addressing mental health, according to Grasso. There are employees who need care but are not willing to reach out for it due to fears about being judged or stigma.

"There's also a second group of folks who may need care but not even recognize it because they have low mental health literacy To them, how they've been living their lives perhaps in a state of distress is just the norm. The third group of folks are those who may not need mental health treatment but still need some tools to help them prioritize their mental health," he said.

Lyra's data insights help identify trends, point out gaps and ultimately guide workplace culture strategy to reach all of these employee groups, Grasso said.

Lyra Health works with companies across a broad sweep of industries from retail to healthcare, manufacturing and tech. "There's been consistent interest across all industries in better addressing mental health among employees," he said.

But many employers are cautious about how to how address burnout, stress and other mental health issues. "They don't want to overstep their boundaries as an employer and it's not their job to be a mental health provider," Grasso said.

Global funding for mental health tech startups reached a record $5.5 billion in 2021, up 139% from the year before, according to a report by CB Insights. In January, Lyra Health snagged $235 million in series G funding, sending the health tech unicorn’s valuation to $5.58 billion as the company focuses its efforts on global expansion.

As the market for tech-enabled mental health services and virtual care has grown, employers also are overwhelmed by different point solutions.

"Many employers have a company they use for engagement surveys, a company they use for their learning and development and they have the mental health vendor and also some kind of wellness promotion vendor," Grasso said. "What we're trying to do at Lyra is bring it all under one umbrella and say, 'We address the full spectrum of need all the way from content for folks who don't need care, but need mental health literacy, all the way through to those folks with severe mental health conditions, who need really specialized care for potentially life-threatening mental illnesses.'"