Expanding Tia’s mental health offerings as part of comprehensive care for women

Today, Tia announced plans to expand our mental health services, including the launch of new mental health programming: Groups. Our aim is simple yet ambitious: reimagine mental health as part of comprehensive women’s healthcare, grounding the service in Tia’s “Whole Woman, Whole Life'' care model that fuses primary care, reproductive health, mental health, and wellness.

Why mental health, why now

How did we get here? Let’s go back to go forward. Two years ago, Tia began offering mental health services as part of our comprehensive women’s health care model. We believed then - and are even more convinced today - that mental health is core to creating a new standard of care for women and that distinctive, sex-specific care starts with the integration of mental and physical health.

Research validates both our approach and the extraordinary demand among women for integrated mental and physical care.

• First, women are feeling disproportionately anxious, depressed, burned out, and stressed compared to men. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, women are twice as likely to experience depression compared to men and three times as likely to experience anxiety.
• We see this in Tia’s own patient population: almost one-third of members have been diagnosed with a mental health condition.
• Moreover, in a Tia survey of 1000 American women last year, 60% of women told us that they strongly agreed mental health should be a core part of primary care yet almost half of women said they don’t get regular screenings for their mental and physical health.

Yet there's been limited research into the causes of the mental health gender gap and a long history of women being told their symptoms are all “in their head”. That all adds up to a lack of treatment options specific to women and mental health care options that are generally siloed from women’s overall health.

Our mental health journey at Tia

Since launching dedicated mental health services two years ago, we’ve expanded Tia’s offering to integrate mental health more deeply into our primary care and wellness services, ensuring our primary care providers are equipped to manage mild to moderate mental health conditions and adding psychiatry services to care for people with more complex mental health needs and to partner with our primary care providers to ensure they feel supported in providing more expanded mental health care in the primary care setting. Most recently we have piloted new wellness-oriented offerings such as Groups.

Most exciting, we have promising initial data that integrating mental and physical care makes women healthier. For example, our early quality data around mental health shows that we are screening women for depression and anxiety at rates much higher than the national average and effectively treating depression and anxiety when diagnosed.

Tia has also experienced some setbacks in our mental health journey. We recently made the difficult decision to close our 1-on-1 therapy offering to the frustration and disappointment of many of our patients and therapists. While 1-on-1 therapy can be a powerful modality for some patients, it also has significant clinical, operational, and financial limitations that kept us from making the program sustainable at Tia.

Tia's full-suite of Mental Health services

Through these ups and downs, Tia has remained committed to evolving our mental health services to continue to bridge the gap between physical and mental health and ultimately make women healthier. I’m thrilled to share the newest mental health programming that we’re introducing today after piloting with our members - Groups - as well as reintroduce our full suite of mental health offerings.

What does Mental Health at Tia look like today?

1. Assess your Mental Health

• Whole Health Exam - Your yearly preventive visit that looks at your physical, mental health & gynecological exam—all in one. Get the preventative care you need and develop a personalized care plan.
• Mental Health Assessments - Feeling anxious, depressed, stressed, or not quite like yourself? Work with a Tia primary care provider to assess your symptoms and develop a plan. If you’re interested in medication for mental health, start here.

2. Care for your Mental Health

• *NEW* Groups (Beta) - Join others on your journey to mental wellness and feel the power of belonging and being heard by connecting with others. Facilitated by a Tia-vetted licensed therapist, in this non-clinical setting you'll share your experiences, receive comfort and encouragement, listen and learn from others, and get tools to process your emotions.
• Acupuncture - Science-backed traditional Asian medicine good for the prevention & treatment of stress, headaches, burn out, chronic pain, & more.
• Mental Health Medication Management - Our in-house prescribing clinicians can manage most medications for anxiety and depression with thorough evaluation and follow-up care.
  

Note: Groups is a new service in Beta, which means they could change over time. They’re also non-clinical services, which means they’re not meant to be a replacement for medical treatment, psychiatric care, or psychotherapy.

Tia’s Mental Health care philosophy

As we continue to evolve Tia’s Mental Health offering, we’re guided by the following principles:

• Sex-specific care - Women are not “small men with different parts”. We have our own unique experience when it comes to our mental health, and we deserve a sex-specific approach to diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, grounded in research.
• Mental health & physical health, together - Your brain doesn’t operate in a silo, disconnected from your body or the world. Emotions and feelings trigger a host of physical changes in the body - your heart rate and blood pressure rise, stress hormones are released into your bloodstream, and your stomach drops. Because the mind and body are one integrated system, we treat mental and physical health together.
• Proactive, not just reactive - We screen for mental health as part of our annual Whole Health Exam and offer services that don’t require a diagnosis to support mental wellness proactively.
• Root causes, not symptoms - To treat the whole you, we consider the biological contributions to mental health alongside other integral factors such as sleep, nutrition, hormonal changes, and more.
• Multiple tools - We believe in offering many options for evaluation and care that map to your needs, preferences, and budget, including non-clinical offerings like Groups where you don’t need a mental health “diagnosis” to get started.
• Social connection - Research shows that lack of social connection heightens health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and that loneliness and social isolation are twice as harmful to physical health as obesity. At Tia, we offer group programming alongside individual care to build connection and community among women and help us process our emotions, together.
• Collaborative care - At Tia, we understand that our physical health is linked to our emotional wellness, which is why we care for both in tandem. Your care team includes mental health professionals, primary care clinicians, gynecologists, psychiatriatry providers, and acupuncturists who collaborate together to care for the whole you.
  

Looking ahead

This is just the beginning. We see an opportunity to normalize the impact that stress and mental health have on all aspects of health and wellbeing - even without a “diagnosis” - and are working to create tools to support women wherever they are in their journey.