Digital mental health services provider Headspace Health announced a new, unified product experience, bringing together Headspace’s meditation and mindfulness offering with Ginger’s on-demand coaching, therapy and psychiatry services. The new experience provides a single destination for high-quality mental health and wellbeing support for employees, as well as an underlying platform that reduces complexity and administrative burden for employers.
How does it work?
For employees, the new Headspace Health experience provides:
- One destination for continuous mental health and wellbeing support: Members can engage in a customized care plan, which may include evidence-based self-guided meditation, mindfulness, and mental wellbeing content from Headspace, and/or text-based behavioral health coaching, video-based therapy or psychiatry support from Ginger.
- A personalized experience: From evidence-based mental health assessments, to check-ins and personalized content and care recommendations, the new experience provides members with continuous support for their evolving mental health and wellbeing needs over time.
- Seamless navigation: Whether a member is heading into a coaching session or listening to a meditation, members can seamlessly navigate between the Ginger and Headspace apps.
Employers will have the benefit of:
- A comprehensive experience with a single implementation: With a unified eligibility system, employers are guided through a streamlined implementation process and provided with ongoing program management support, giving them more time to focus on their broader health benefits strategy.
- End-to-end insights: The new experience provides employers with an end-to-end view of both engagement and outcome metrics, helping them to better understand the mental health employee needs of their employees in aggregate.
- Robust member communications: Employers will be provided with communications support to reduce mental health stigma, drive awareness of the available options for support, and ultimately help to drive enrollment and engagement across the new experience.
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) services: Employers can also benefit from an expansive EAP offering, providing Headspace Health’s unified mental health and wellbeing experience, together with work-life services, critical incident support, workplace training and manager consultations.
The Headspace Health unified experience will become available to new customers beginning in January 2023.
On the record
“The Headspace Health unified experience is all about making it easier to engage with mental health and wellness services and to be kind to your mind, regardless of where you are on your mental health journey,” said Russell Glass, CEO of Headspace Health. “Companies trust that Headspace Health can address employees’ mental health needs across the spectrum, but importantly, will lead with prevention to address challenges before they become acute and costly.”
“Headspace has played a pivotal role in destigmatizing mental health for over a decade, making meditation and mindfulness accessible, approachable, effective and affordable,” said Leslie Witt, chief product and design officer of Headspace Health. “With our unified experience, we’re now leveraging Headspace as the front door to a full suite of evidence-based mental health services – from a broad array of self-care tools to fuel wellbeing and healthy habits, to a range of human services, from coaching through psychiatric care, to address more acute needs. This approach allows us to support every employee – and their families – throughout their life journey, and to flexibly scale and adapt to their mental health needs as they evolve.”
The context
As the global mental health crisis intensifies, employees are increasingly looking to their employers for support. A study conducted by Headspace Health earlier this year showed that 80% of employees believe it is the employer’s responsibility to help with mental health. While employers understand the imperative to provide mental health and wellbeing support, benefits programs have become increasingly complex to manage amidst growing point-solution fatigue and inflationary healthcare cost pressures. To address these converging market dynamics, employers will need to deploy comprehensive solutions that deliver end-to-end support while ultimately reducing the total cost of care.