Lyra Health: Transforming Mental Health

In January 2022, Lyra Health was deciding between several different alternatives to grow the business. Founded in 2015, Lyra Health, was a digital mental health platform that combined technology with human therapists and coaches to deliver high quality mental health care to patients. One in five Americans suffered from mental health challenges each year, resulting in significant lost productivity. Yet access to mental health providers was severely limited since many providers did not accept insurance. Quality of care also varied as many providers did not use clinically proven therapeutic treatments. Lyra brought a new approach to the problem by offering easily accessible, high quality mental health services to employees of companies as part of a reimagined employee assistance program (EAP) that encouraged usage. To date, Lyra had focused on large enterprise customers, such as Starbucks, Facebook, and Morgan Stanley. The company believed there was significant untapped opportunity in the corporate enterprise market, but acknowledged that to continue to grow after 2025, it would need to tap into other customer segments. The company was considering expanding internationally, expanding into higher acuity care, targeting small business, and selling to government funded health plans. Each required significant changes to the product as well as operational changes, so realistically, Lyra could only focus on one or two growth options in the near term, and picking the order was important.