Exclusive: Calm expands to offer clinical mental health programs and medication tracking
Mindfulness company Calm is launching a new healthcare offering in its bid to corner the mental health market.
Calm Health will offer clinical, condition-specific, mental health programs, medication tracking, and other tools supporting provider and caregiver communication. The initial suite of services is expected to roll out as a new app in the first quarter of 2023 and will be available for free through participating health insurance plans, care providers, or employers.
“We’ve always said that we want to support everyone on every step of their mental health journey as a company,” Calm CEO David Ko tells Fast Company. “We have different products for different people and different segments. So this is a natural kind of progression for us as a company.”
Founded in 2012, Calm is well known for its “sleep and meditation” guides, some of which are voiced by celebrities, and costs users $70 annually. Boosted by the pandemic, the company has seen user rates skyrocket to more than 100 million downloads, and has spent the past two years focusing on expanding its lines of business. Calm began offering enterprise services in 2019, allowing employers to offer the meditation app as a company perk. (Ko says the company projects that over 3,000 employers will have signed up for the service by year end.) And earlier this year, Calm acquired health-tech company Ripple Health Group—a move that helped build Calm Health.
“The first 10 years of Calm have been really around bringing this amazing product to consumers through the app store on a direct-to-consumer basis,” Ko says. “But we also recognize the next 10 years of Calm have to be through all channels.”
After receiving access to Calm Health, users will be asked to complete an in-app survey to figure out which level of support they may need. Users will be ranked on a scale of low to high for a condition. For example, a person could be placed on a plan to help low-to-moderate anxiety. If a person is in need of a higher level of care, Calm Health will recommend support from a therapist and provide tools to access one. Calm Health’s clinical programs will support conditions such as anxiety and depression in a more structured manner than one would find within the direct-to-consumer app. It also will offer guided plans to help users prepare for therapy or use between sessions. In the future, the company says it plans to add mental health support for physical conditions, such as cancer, heart disease, and hypertension.
“We do believe the mind and body are intertwined, in terms of how we should be looking at it from a healthcare perspective,” Ko says. “And that’s something that is very unique; with what we’re going to be talking about and rolling out in the near future is that intersection between mental and physical health.”
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