Breakthrough.com

Breakthrough.com connects mental health providers with clients via video, phone, email, and chat. 

Fifty eight million Americans have a mental illness and millions more struggle with stress and relationship issues. Therapy and medications work, but are stigmatizing, hard to access, costly, and inconvenient. Telemedicine has been shown to address these issues.

Clients can search for providers on a variety of criteria, be anonymous, take diagnostic tests, seek peer support in free communities, and engage in sessions via secure video, phone, email, and chat. 

Providers such as psychologists, counselors, and social workers can hold secure sessions and build an online profile with their prices, mediums, degrees, styles, specialties, and associations. Breakthrough confirms all providers are credentialed professionals.

Breakthrough can also help health plans, hospitals, schools, prisons, employee assistance programs, and veteran groups.  Breakthrough can also help clients and providers receive insurance reimbursement so that treatment is low cost or free.

A video of Breakthrough's launch at TechCrunch50 is here:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2167353

--Mark Goldenson, Chief Executive Officer. Mark has twelve years of experience in leading internet ventures. Mark is a former Product Manager at PayPal, an alumnus in health care and neuroscience from Stanford, and conducted four years of psychology research in Stanford's Psychophysiology Lab.

Mark also co-founded the Stanford Bazaar, an eBay for Stanford acquired by the university, Woosh, a service that helped small businesses get online that raised $21M, and PlayCafe, an online game show network funded by First Round Capital and top angels.

-Julian Cohen, Chief Sales Officer. Julian has over thirty years of experience in mental health care. Julian was Chief Marketing Officer at United Behavioral Health, the largest mental health insurer, CEO at Cigna Behavioral, VP at APS Healthcare and WellCare, and President of Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Institute of Psychiatry.  He has a bachelor's in social work and a master's in public health.

- Chris Hughes, Chief Technology Officer. Chris has built health IT applications for over sixteen years. He was Director of Operations at Philips Healthcare and VP of Operations at Stentor, a leading radiology IT vendor acquired by Philips for $280M. He was also a Medical Informatics researcher at Stanford where he completed a master’s degree in computer science.

Breakthrough.com is free for clients. It is also free for mental health providers seeing out-of-pocket clients..

We earn revenue by charging organizations such as health plans, schools, and employers, which can pay to use Breakthrough's technology with in-house providers or to access Breakthrough's national network of providers. 

We also earn revenue for processing insurance claims for providers. 87% of the $21B spent on counseling is reimbursed so this revenue model taps the majority of the market.

Breakthrough has several competitive advantages:

-Unlike general marketplaces like Skype, Ether, and LivePerson, we focus only on licensed mental health professionals and do not allow psychics, astrologists, or other shady participants. This allows us to target organizations and build a trusted brand. We are also HIPAA-compliant and built to handle highly sensitive medical transactions.

-Unlike online health sites that try to serve all medical specialties, we focus only on mental health. Counseling and psychiatry are the fields best suited to online medicine because communication is the treatment. This allows us to focus our product and marketing on the unique needs of the market.

-Unlike some competitors, our team has deep experience in building internet health care and security applications. See our management bios for more details.