LifeStance Health Group, Inc. (LifeStance) operates as a provider of outpatient mental health services, spanning psychiatric evaluations and treatment, psychological and neuropsychological testing, and individual, family and group therapy.
The company is dedicated to improving the lives of its patients by reimagining mental health through a tech-enabled in-person and virtual care delivery model built to expand access and affordability, and improve outcomes. The company combines a personalized,...
LifeStance Health Group, Inc. (LifeStance) operates as a provider of outpatient mental health services, spanning psychiatric evaluations and treatment, psychological and neuropsychological testing, and individual, family and group therapy.
The company is dedicated to improving the lives of its patients by reimagining mental health through a tech-enabled in-person and virtual care delivery model built to expand access and affordability, and improve outcomes. The company combines a personalized, digitally powered patient experience with differentiated, multidisciplinary clinical capabilities and in-network insurance relationships to fundamentally transform patient access to mental health treatment. By revolutionizing the way mental healthcare is delivered, the company has an opportunity to improve the lives and health of millions of individuals.
The company employed 7,424 licensed mental health clinicians through its subsidiaries and supported practices in 33 states as of December 31, 2024. The company’s clinicians offer patients a comprehensive, multidisciplinary suite of mental health services, spanning psychiatric evaluations and treatment, psychological and neuropsychological testing, and individual, family and group therapy. The company treats a broad range of mental health conditions, including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, psychotic disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. Patients can receive care virtually through the company’s online delivery platform or in-person at one of its conveniently located centers. Through the company’s payor relationships, including national agreements with multiple payors, patients can utilize their in-network benefits when they receive care from one of its clinicians, enhancing access and affordability.
The company is the front-door to comprehensive outpatient mental healthcare. The company clinicians offer patients a full spectrum of outpatient services to treat mental health conditions. The company’s in-network payor relationships improve patient access by allowing patients to access mental healthcare just as they would a primary care physician's visit without significant out-of-pocket cost or delays in receiving treatment. The company’s personalized, data-driven comprehensive care meets patients where they are through convenient virtual and in-person settings. The company supports its patients throughout their care continuum with purpose-built technological capabilities, including online assessments, digital provider communication, and seamless internal referral and follow-up capabilities.
The company empowers clinicians to focus on patient care and relationships by providing what it believes is a superior workplace environment, as well as clinical and technological capabilities to deliver high-quality care. The company offers a unique employment model for clinicians in a collaborative clinical environment—with clinicians employed by its subsidiaries and supported practices and the company improves patient access through in-network payor contracts and primary care and specialist physician referrals. The company’s integrated platform and national infrastructure reduce administrative burdens for clinicians while increasing engagement and satisfaction. The company’s digital platform enables collaboration across the clinician team.
The company partners with payors to deliver access to high-quality outpatient mental healthcare to their members at scale. Through the company’s extensive scale, it offers payors a pathway to reduce overall cost of care in the broader healthcare system while supporting improved physical and mental health outcomes. By offering access to the company’s services, payors also have an opportunity to reduce their employer customers’ significant mental health costs arising from higher employee absenteeism and lower productivity.
The company collaborates with primary care and specialist physicians to enhance patient care. Primary care is an important setting for the treatment of mental health conditions—primary care physicians are often the sole connection to the healthcare system for patients with a mental illness and, in instances where patients have a chronic condition, specialist physicians often step into the role of primary care physicians in managing these patients' overall health. The company partners with primary care physicians and specialist physician groups across the country to provide a mental healthcare network for referrals, and in certain instances, through virtual integration and physical co-location, to improve the diagnosis and treatment of their patients who suffer from mental health conditions.
The company’s scale, breadth of capabilities and value proposition to its key stakeholders enables the company to drive this transformation. The company has over 13 integrated care programs underway, including partnerships with primary care providers, specialists and chronic care providers as it led efforts to demonstrate the ability of fully integrated mental health models to improve overall health outcomes. In certain instances, the company co-locates its clinicians at partners' facilities to promote seamless mental health treatment and enable collaborative delivery of care.
The company generates revenue on a per-visit basis when a patient receives care from one of its clinicians. Depending on the state, the company clinicians are either employed directly through its subsidiaries or through the company’s supported practices, for which it manages day-to-day operations pursuant to long-term management services contracts. The company’s revenue is generally derived from patients with in-network insurance coverage, pursuant to which its subsidiaries or supported practices are reimbursed for patient services.
For the year ended December 31, 2024, 91% of the company’s revenue was derived from patients with commercial in-network payors, 5% of its revenue was derived from patients with government payors, 3% of the company’s revenue was derived from patients on a self-pay basis and 1% of its revenue was derived from non-patient services. The company contracts with payors are typically structured as fee-for-service arrangements, with negotiated reimbursement rates for its clinical services. With respect to the company’s supported practices, its revenue is derived from management fees negotiated under its management services contracts.
The company’s model is built to empower each of the healthcare ecosystem’s key stakeholders and align around its shared goal of delivering a healthier life for patients by creating access to high-quality mental healthcare.
Patients Gain Access to High-Quality Care When and Where They Need It
The company’s clinicians treated more than 940,000 unique patients through approximately 7.9 million visits in 2024. The company aim to deliver value to the company’s patients in multiple ways:
Superior Patient Experience: The company has a relentless focus on delivering a superior experience to the company’s patients. The company enables its patients to conveniently see their clinician through their preferred choice of virtual or in-person visits. The company optimizes patient engagement through its convenient digital tools, including online scheduling, adherence reminders, online prescription refills and online payments. The company’s centers are built to a superior standard that provides the company’s patients with a best-in class visit experience. Enabling the company’s patients and elevating their experience makes them more likely to seek help, resulting in higher engagement and an increased likelihood they will continue treatment. The company’s superior patient experience drives increased patient engagement—in 2024, 86% of the company’s patients have had two or more visits with the company’s clinicians.
Front Door to Comprehensive Mental Healthcare: The company offers comprehensive, multidisciplinary access to a suite of services to meet the company’s patients’ needs through their mental healthcare journey. The company’s patients have access to the company’s comprehensive team of licensed mental health clinicians, including psychiatrists, advanced practice nurses (‘APNs’), psychologists and therapists. The company use a data-driven digital onboarding process to match patients with clinicians based on their needs and collaborate to develop medically-driven care plans. The company believe the company’s breadth of clinical capabilities enables superior coordination among disciplines to deliver the company’s patients the best possible care.
Increased Access and Affordability through In-Network Coverage: The company has national and regional payor relationships, which improve access and affordability for the company’s patients. The company’s in-network patients can seek initial mental health screening, clinical treatment and subsequent therapy or follow-up as needed in a timely and affordable manner appropriate for their needs.
Clinicians Are Empowered to Focus on Improving the Lives of Their Patients
The company delivers value to its clinicians through its clinician value proposition, which includes:
The company’s platform enables its clinicians to focus on delivering the best possible care to their patients. The company’s augment their ability to serve their patients through technology tools and data, while freeing them from the many non-clinical burdens they face in independent practice, so that they can dedicate their time and energy to providing high-quality care to their patients.
The company promotes a clinical culture of collaboration and ongoing learning for its team of mental health professionals. The company’s clinicians share evidence-based practices and meet regularly for continuing education and other collaborative opportunities for learning. They are also strongly supported to work together across disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and clinically effective care possible—often the most effective, evidence-based treatment modality is a combination of psychotherapy and psychiatric medication, and the company’s mix of prescribers and non-prescribers supports the ability to provide optimal patient care.
The company conveniently located centers and virtual care delivery platform provide its clinicians with greater flexibility and convenience to serve their patients in whatever environment is most suitable. This flexibility improves clinician engagement, efficiency and their overall working environment.
The company’s unified electronic health record tracking platform, combined with its management of day-to-day operational aspects, such as marketing, payor contracting, billing and collecting, intake, and scheduling, alleviates administrative burden and improves overall career engagement.
With the company’s robust support services, it alleviates the administrative burden and free clinicians from the many nonclinical burdens they face in an independent practice, allowing them to dedicate their time to patient care.
The company’s clinicians are employed as W-2 employees by its subsidiaries and supported practices rather than as independent contractors, the latter of which is more common in the mental healthcare industry in the United States. Additionally, the company offers a flexible visit-based economic model, which allows its clinicians to build their patient panels while flexibly managing caseloads.
Payor Partners Expand Access
The company has in-network payor relationships offering access to its clinician team. The company delivers value to its payor partners in several ways:
Access to a national clinician employee base: The company delivers a scaled and comprehensive multidisciplinary mental healthcare offering with an appropriate mix of psychiatric and therapeutic expertise for payors to offer to their members and employer clients.
Stronger member and client value proposition: The company’s clinicians provide best-in-class mental health treatment services and experience, which enables payors to provide to their members a superior experience. Because mental health conditions can lead to employee absenteeism and lower productivity, the company’s payor partners are also well-positioned to deliver value to their employer clients.
Primary Care and Specialist Physician Partners Can More Effectively Improve the Lives of their Patients
The company partners with primary care physicians and specialist physician groups to deliver improved health outcomes for its shared patients:
More efficient referral base to broaden access: The company offers its primary care, and specialist partners a diverse group of mental health clinicians to which they can refer their patients, allowing their patients to receive high-quality, evidence-based care covering their mental and physical health needs. Large provider groups can partner with the company to streamline their mental health referrals and receive visibility into the status of their patients once they are referred. By gaining access to the company’s extensive team of clinicians, primary care and specialist physicians feel more comfortable screening for and identifying mental health conditions and can more easily and consistently connect patients with the care they need.
Growth Strategies
The key elements of the company’s strategy include highly scalable platform with proven growth playbook; expanding and optimizing its presence in existing markets; entering new markets; and growing its partnerships with key stakeholders.
Integrated Platform Is Reimagining Mental Health
The company has purpose-built an integrated platform to reimagine how mental healthcare is delivered. Its patient-focused platform combines differentiated clinical capabilities with a personalized, digitally powered patient experience designed to transform patient access and treatment.
Extensive Scale, Breadth and Access
The company is reimagining access to mental healthcare in the United States. The company is one of the nation’s largest providers of outpatient mental healthcare in the country based on the number of clinicians its employees through the company’s subsidiaries and its supported practices and the company’s geographic scale, employing 7,424 dedicated clinicians in 33 states, as of December 31, 2024. In 2024, the company’s clinicians treated more than 940,000 unique patients through approximately 7.9 million visits. The company serves all patient demographics through a comprehensive suite of mental health services to treat the most common mental health conditions. The company’s care delivery model enables patient access via virtual or in-person visits, at their convenience.
Clinicians
The company strives to provide a best-in-class working environment for its psychiatrists, APNs, psychologists and therapists. The company’s dedicated employment model offers a superior value proposition compared to independent practice. The company employs a comprehensive range of mental health professionals to provide multi-disciplinary clinical modalities through its subsidiaries and its supported practices. The company serves all patient demographics—children, adolescents, adults and geriatrics. Patients have seamless access to its multidisciplinary team of licensed mental health clinicians, including psychiatrists, APNs, psychologists and therapists. The company’s breadth of clinical capabilities facilitates coordination across psychiatric and psychotherapy treatment modalities, limiting the need to refer patients externally as their needs are met within its comprehensive service offerings. The company’s clinicians have access to its digital platform, which allows for shared electronic medical records for internal communication, and facilitates patient referrals within the company’s clinician team, both of which support its collaborative approach to care.
Clinical Services
The company offers a comprehensive suite of services to meet patients’ needs across their mental healthcare journey. The company’s clinicians provide services spanning psychiatric evaluations and treatment, psychological and neuropsychological testing, and individual, family and group therapy. The company treats a broad range of mental health conditions, including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, psychotic disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. The company uses evidence-based approaches to ensure effective treatment.
Digital Strategy
The company has built a holistic, people-driven, digitally enabled care experience.
From the first interaction with LifeStance, the company’s digital capabilities enable it to improve patient access, match patients with clinicians more efficiently and successfully, inform clinician decisions through data-driven insights and streamline referrals and consultations.
The company is uniting virtual and in-person treatment with the goal to redefine the delivery of mental healthcare for consumers across the ecosystem—one that delivers virtual engagement as personalized and human as the best in-person visits, and in-person visits as simple and seamless as the best digital experiences.
Hybrid Care Delivery Model
The company delivers comprehensive care to its patients through a seamless and convenient virtual and in-person experience that allows patients to choose how they access their treatment. Within the company’s care delivery model, patients can easily switch from virtual to in-person care due to unforeseen circumstances—for example, if they are delayed at work, traveling or at home with an ill child—which improves continuity of care. This flexibility is especially critical in certain circumstances when, for example, a patient changes medications and a two-week follow-up is necessary to ensure effectiveness. The company’s hybrid virtual and in-person delivery model is also crucial in treating certain mental health conditions, such as active substance abuse, eating disorders and autism, where it believes in-person treatment is essential to generate successful outcomes compared to virtual-only delivery models.
Centers
The company’s patients can receive in-person care at one of its 569 centers, both acquired and de novo. The company’s typical de novo center comprises 4,000 to 5,000 square feet and 12 to 15 clinician exam rooms. To provide the company’s patients and clinicians with flexibility, its centers are generally open five days a week from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. local time, with some open on Saturdays. Each of the company’s centers offers a comprehensive clinical care team of clinicians offering psychiatric and psychotherapy services.
The company’s de novo centers are built and fully outfitted to architectural design standards to create a comfortable and welcoming experience for its patients and clinicians that is replicated across the company’s markets. The company’s spaces are compassionate, human-centric environments, thoughtfully designed to support best practices in mental healthcare, while providing a collaborative and inclusive backdrop for patients and clinicians alike.
Virtual Care
To enhance patient access, the company offers patients the ability to conduct a given visit with their clinician virtually. The company’s virtual visit experience is convenient and easy to use. Patients can schedule their visit online and are able to conduct their visit via its digital platform at the time of their appointment from their computer, mobile device or tablet. In advance of their appointments, patients are sent an automatic reminder via text or e-mail, depending on their preference, with a link to launch the visit. The company further optimizes patients’ engagement through its convenient digital tools, including online messaging, adherence reminders, online prescription refills and online payments. The company’s patient portal allows patients and clinicians to communicate regularly, which is critical in a variety of circumstances, including for example, to help prevent errors in medication dosing and compliance.
Patient Acquisition Strategy
The company focuses on driving growth in its patient base primarily through two avenues: pursuing contracts with payors on a national, regional and local level; and the company’s development of referral relationships with physicians, most notably in primary care, as well as specialist physicians.
Payor Relationships
The company has a large and diverse base of national, regional and local payors. The company’s dedicated payor relationship team is divided into regions to ensure that strong relationships with regional operations teams and insurance companies are cultivated. The company’s payor contracting teams consist of professionals with decades of experience working with a broad spectrum of payors from large national payors to regional and state-based payors. The company’s teams negotiate, implement and manage new payor relationships, drive regional rate improvement and advance key initiatives. Two payors individually exceeded 10% of the company’s total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024: UnitedHealthcare and Elevance Health, Inc., comprising 17% and 15%, respectively. The company’s contracts with payors are generally fee-for-services arrangements.
Physician Relationships
The company has a large base of regional referring primary care physicians, specialist physicians and other network providers. Within the company’s markets, it partners with primary care practice groups, specialists, health systems and academic institutions to refer patients to the company’s centers and clinicians. To build and maintain this base of partners the company has a dedicated partner relationship team that works directly with these partners along with its regional operations teams. This team focuses primarily on creating awareness of the company’s platform and services, including existing and new centers as well the introduction of newly hired clinicians with appointment availability and providing defined referral pathways to help these partners and their patients timely access care. When establishing new centers, it seeks to build relationships with proximally located primary care and specialty offices as well as psychiatric hospitals to raise awareness.
Marketing Efforts
The company also uses marketing strategies to develop its national brand to increase brand awareness and promote additional channels of patient recruitment. The company’s channel marketing strategies are online through web, social media and paid social ad campaigns and search engines, including direct-to-consumer paid search optimization. Clinicians accepting new patients can be booked for appointments directly online. It also hands out a limited number of printed brochures or other marketing materials to raise awareness of the company locally.
Organization
The company owns substantially all of the non-medical assets of the center and enter into a long-term management services contract with the center pursuant to which it provides all the management services to the center that it needs to operate, with the exception of medical or clinical services. As of December 31, 2024, 397 of the company’s 569 centers were operated as supported practices. The company manages its wholly-owned centers and supported practices consistently and generally do not distinguish between the company wholly-owned centers and supported practices in operating its business, subject to compliance with applicable law.
The company’s subsidiaries directly employ the clinicians who practice at its wholly owned centers, whereas, with respect to the company’s supported practices, its supported practices directly employ the clinicians.
Payor Agreements
The company and its supported practices has payor relationships across multiple independent regional and national contracts. These relationships allow members to utilize their in-network benefits when such individual elects to receive service from one of the company’s clinicians. As of December 31, 2024, the company’s contracts with payors typically provide for an initial term of one to three years and auto-renewal thereafter for additional one-year terms, with a majority of those agreements in automatic annual renewal stages. The contracts with the company’s two largest payor partners are entered into on substantially consistent terms. In most markets, the company’s practices have been contracted (in-network with payors) for more than a decade. While length of contract and economic terms are often negotiated, payors generally use form contracts that contain terms and conditions that are standard in the industry. A small number of the company’s agreements with payors also include terms and conditions to incentivize it and facilitates its ability to provide quality care to that plan’s members, with modest bonus payments tied to quality or utilization metrics.
The contracts governing the relationships with the company’s payors include terms such as the period of performance, reimbursement rates and termination clauses. Typically, these contracts provide for a pre-determined fee based on a negotiated fee for service schedule or a customary charge that is typically a certain percentage of the fees specified in the CMS Medicare Physician Fee Schedule that is charged to the patient and the payor when a patient covered by the payor obtains services from one of the company’s clinicians.
Many of its contracts are terminable for convenience by either the payor or the company after a notice period has passed. The related notice period in the company’s contracts is negotiated on a case-by-case basis and is dependent on many factors, some of which are outside of its control.
The contracts with its payors impose other obligations on the company. For example, the company typically agrees that all services provided under the payor contract and all employees providing such services will comply with the payor’s policies and procedures. Further, upon termination, the company is generally obligated to continue the provision of covered services to a member for a certain amount of time or a given event, for example, for a period of 60 days or until the member is discharged from services.
Government Regulation
The company must comply with various federal and state laws related to the privacy and security of personal identifiable information (PII), including health information. In particular, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) establishes privacy and security standards that limit the use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI) and requires the implementation of administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of PHI.
The company is also subject to the HIPAA breach notification rule, which requires covered entities to notify affected individuals of breaches of unsecured PHI. The company must comply with such laws in the states where it does business in addition to its obligations under HIPAA.
The company is subject to the federal physician Ethics in Patient Referrals Act, commonly known as the Stark Law, which prohibits physicians from referring Medicare or Medicaid patients to an entity for the provision of certain ‘designated health services’ if the referring physician or a member of the physician’s immediate family has a direct or indirect financial relationship (including an ownership interest or a compensation arrangement) with the entity, unless an exception applies.
History
LifeStance Health Group, Inc. was founded in 2017. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2021.
