Digital health platforms have become the preferred way patients access behavioral health services because they directly connect patients with providers. Whereas before patients could only talk to their therapists or psychiatrists by going to their office or leaving a message, today, patients can call, text, or Zoom from the comfort of their own home. Mental health demand has surged post-pandemic, with the vertical growing 63% since 2020.
Compared to the rest of the telehealth industry, behavioral health platforms have exploded in growth. Last year, digital health companies raised a collective $5 billion, while the industry is poised to reach a $266.8 billion valuation by 2026. The fastest-growing telehealth companies are all in the mental health category, including Grow Therapy, Charlie Health, Alma, Talkiatry, and more, according to SingleAim. They’re the reason telehealth is here to stay.
Source: https://www.singleaimhealth.com/news/the-state-of-telemedicine-in-2024
To power this growth, organizations are increasingly building a network of 1099 providers that meet patient demand.
Patients (and Providers) Prefer Telehealth Options for Behavioral Health
This flexible workforce allows provider networks to scale as demand waxes and wanes—meeting patients where they are and giving providers better work-life balance.
Patients overwhelmingly favor virtual options to receive their care. Today’s patients demand convenient options. 62% of respondents to a McKinsey survey choose telehealth for a recent behavioral health appointment, citing convenience and satisfaction as primary reasons they plan to continue. (That number is as high as 60% for telehealth in general, as well.)
But it’s also popular for providers.These are credentialed mental health professionals looking for more flexibility in an industry known for long hours and demanding patients. Stacy Thiry, a licensed mental health counselor, recently shared his experience using the Grow Therapy platform. “They take all of the leg work out of building the practice, generating the clients and the insurance billing so that you can really get out there and start helping people.”
Challenges with 1099 Provider Networks
But taking a behavioral health practice virtual isn’t without its challenges. For a New York-based mental health enterprise, their explosive growth—reaching 4,000 clients with big names like Microsoft, The Hershey Company, and Fujifilm—meant they needed scale, and fast. Their contractor provider pool quickly reached 10,000 mental health professionals that provided a variety of different services, from licensed psychotherapists and psychologists to family practitioners.
This kind of scale created a serious administrative headache when it came time to manage the back-end of a contractor-based workforce. Trying to cobble together systems that can’t (and won’t) talk to one another—including the appointment system that logs provider hours—leads to provider churn, payment delays, and compliance risks.
Take 1099 processing. Their accounts payable manager says, January “was a hectic time to say the least. Manually managing that process for thousands of providers is insane.”
Best Practices to Manage 1099 Provider Networks for Behavioral Health
January isn’t hectic any longer for the New York-based behavioral health platform. With Wingspan, they’ve been able to onboard hundreds of providers, pay them on time, and process 1099s easily. This doesn’t just make it easier on their team—it gives them a competitive edge in a market that’s full of up-and-coming platforms competing on both patients and provider networks.
With Wingspan, you can:
- Onboard providers online with an easy to use digital portal that takes them through key steps in the onboarding process, like credentialing and TIN.
- Simplify your payment operations with automatic reconciliation, tabulation, and processing designed to deal with varying hours and services your providers offer.
- Automate the entire 1099 process from creating forms to fixing errors to filing with the IRS.
This saves them 80+ hours each month, allowing them to focus on more strategic growth as they scale their platform. “We don’t need all-hands on deck anymore now that we’ve got Wingspan,” says the accounts payable manager. “When you work with thousands of providers like we do, it’s a huge relief to have a trusted partner to help manage the complexity behind that operation. Wingspan is an amazing tool for accounts payable and finance teams looking to manage large scale networks of 1099s. I’d easily take it with me to future companies.”
Learn more about how Wingspan enables telehealth companies to grow faster >
We’ll be at booth #523 at The Behavioral Health Tech Conference in San Diego! Book time with our team ahead of the event to make sure we connect. →
