Amae Health, a startup focused on severe mental illness, picked up a $6 million investment from Cedars-Sinai as it continues to grow its in-person clinics across the country.
The investment builds on Cedars-Sinai's partnership with Amae Health, which started over two years ago when the startup opened its first outpatient clinic in Los Angeles.
Amae Health takes a data-driven approach to the treatment and care of SMIs with psychiatrist-led integrated care and wraparound mental health services. It built an integrated care team consisting of psychiatrists, primary care providers, therapists, health coaches, peer supporters and social workers. The company aims to tie physical care into serious mental illness treatment.
Amae Health provides comprehensive care for schizophrenia, psychosis, mania, suicidality, co-occurring substance use disorder, borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder in its treatment centers.
In the past two years, Amae Health has built a strong relationship with Itai Danovitch, M.D., chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, according to Amae Health co-founder and CEO Stas Sokolin.
"He's been working with our psychiatry leadership and his team really recognizes that we're a great place to send individuals post-hospitalization at Cedars Sinai. After a couple of years of working together, I think the psychiatry leadership team recognized our clinics just being very unique in our ability to take care of very complex population. Coupled with that, the venture side of of Cedars recognized that there was a a good opportunity for investment to do a partnership to really bring the bring the organizations much closer together," Sokolin said.
The partnership with Cedars-Sinai includes an electronic health record integration, he noted. "We'll be able to communicate and share information on members and data back and forth. It's a collaboration partnership. Once somebody's leaving Cedars, a patient always has a choice of where they want to go to but usually there's a referral being made on the provider side to say, 'Here are your options. Here's where I would recommend that you go based upon your illness and your symptoms.' We'll also be doing research together of each organizations and collaborating on our technology platform," Sokolin said.
“Physical and mental health go hand-in-hand, and patients with serious mental illness can often benefit from structured, individualized plans,” Danovitch said in a statement. “Our investment in Amae Health represents our ongoing commitment to whole-person health.”
Cedars-Sinai’s investment support highlights the strategic role health systems can play in reshaping the behavioral health landscape, executives at both organizations said. By aligning with innovative providers like Amae, systems can address critical care gaps and set a new standard for whole-person healthcare.
Sonia Garcia, Amae Health co-founder and chief product officer, said Amae Health community health workers visit Cedars-Sinai hospitals to connect and engage with patients who are hospitalized or in emergency centers to "start to build trust and a relationship with patients and families."
"We structure what's called a warm handoff so that folks can be basically liaisoned over into our care same day, next day, post discharge, and it makes it for a very effective relationship, which oftentimes is, it's quite sensitive and quite difficult for folks to engage in follow-on care, and you often have kind of a breakdown taking place there. That's one of the other core elements that really differentiates what we're doing and how well we're able to do that," Garcia said.
The Cedars-Sinai investment represents a pivotal moment as Amae enters its next phase of growth. The startup reports that it is driving improved outcomes for individuals with SMI since opening its first clinic in Los Angeles over two years ago and is now focused on scaling this model in New York City and across the country.
In April, Amae Health closed a $15 million series A round. It has opened a clinic in New York City and has a strategic partnership with NewYork-Presbyterian. The two organizations aim to expand access to high-quality, community-based mental health services for individuals with conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and severe mood disorders in New York City. Amae Health also opened a clinic in Raleigh, North Carolina, and plans to open an outpatient clinic in Houston in January, Sokolin said.
Quiet Capital led the series A round, which the company said was oversubscribed. Amir Dan Rubin’s venture firm Healthier Capital also invested in Amae Health in that funding round, along with Baszucki Group, and angel investor Mike Volpi, Index Ventures managing partner. Amae Health’s original seed investors all participated in the round, including Able Partners, Virtue VC, Bling Capital and 8VC.
According to the National Institutes of Health, there are an estimated 14.1 million adults aged 18 or older in the U.S. with a SMI such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of SMI (11.4%) with a 322% increase in annual deaths due to drug overdose and suicide.
Treatment and care services for SMI can often be episodic, fragmented and difficult to access, with the emergency room often the default place where individuals seek care. Amae Health offers community-based care, Sokolin noted, along with behavioral health and physical health services peer support will help individuals get jobs or go back to school.
Amae Health seeks to address this problem by taking an integrated and long-term approach that is multiphased, Garcia noted. "We want to ensure we're doing this care delivery at the right phase of what a patient needs at the right time. Folks will come to us typically following a hospitalization or very acute event, and we'll integrate them into our clinic, engage in a psychiatric evaluation, and then basically they typically start in our care as an intensive phase of five days, five hours a week, stepping down to maybe three days or so as they adhere to their treatment plans and medications, and then ultimately stepping down to maintenance mode of engaging perhaps once a month that looks more like traditional outpatient," Garcia said. "We work with them on their life goals and their adherence to some kind of purpose and meaning in their life, where they're adding a lot of structure and returning to work or school or re-engaging into the community."
Sokolin and Garcia were motivated by their personal experiences to launch the startup, they both shared with Fierce Healthcare back in April. They had lost or seen their loved ones suffer from SMI and were deeply frustrated by the lack of available adequate care.
Garcia lost her father to suicide when she was 16 years old and then became a caregiver for her brother, who suffers from schizoaffective and bipolar disorder. She earned an engineering degree from Rice and Stanford and previously worked at family mental health startup Brightline as director of member experience.
Sokolin's family came to the U.S. in the late 1980s as refugees from Belarus. Both his father and sister had bipolar disorder. "Mental health was not a thing in the Soviet Union. My father was deeply affected; my sister a lot more. She probably spent about 10 years of her life either incarcerated, unhoused and in hospitals, due to her mental illness and substance use addiction, All of our families' time, resources and energy was spent to try to get her help and the system repeatedly failed over and over," he said.
There is a lot of activity in the behavioral health market as startups focus on mild to moderate mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, but there are not as many companies focused on treating SMI, Sokolin noted.
Motivated by their personal experiences, Sokolin and Garcia wanted to bring a whole-person, integrated, psychiatry-led approach to SMI. Amae Health's model was inspired by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ mental health intensive case management program.
The company also has invested in technology to develop what it calls a precision medicine platform to use data to deliver better, more personalized treatment and care. The company tapped former Palantir executive Andrew Girvin to serve as head of artificial intelligence. "We've been doubling down our technology team, on our AI platform and research aspects to figure out, how do we prescribe better? How do we develop precision medicine? How do we know what therapeutic intervention will work with somebody so we don't just try this one-size-fits-all approach, which really has been what the field has predominantly done for the last 40 to 50," Sokolin said.
AI and technology can support better treatment protocols and clinical standardization, Garcia noted. "It's human-led care augmented by technology and AI," she said.
Amae Health also puts a strong focus on service excellence and hospitality, Garcia noted, two features not often associated with mental health outpatient clinics. "We invest a lot into our clinic spaces to make them holistic community centers, where there's a lot of intentionality brought into play for folks to feel safe, respected, heard, and where they can truly recover," Garcia said.
To this end, the company has brought hospitality executives, such as a former Four Seasons program director, on board to create spaces that are "calm and serene," Sokolin said. "Many community mental health centers, they're not the nicest places you want to go to. We try to recreate the environment as if you're going to a very nice hotel in terms of how we treat our members and how the staff speaks to families."
Company executives also say the company's approach to SMI treatment offers a cost-effective solution for payers by focusing on value-based care contracts. Amae Health continues to build its payer partnerships and works with Blue Shield of California, Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Magellan, Carelon and others. The company also works with Medicaid plans.