🔍 TL;DR:

For patients, we deliver world-class psychiatric care covered by insurance. For providers, our tech + LLM agents reduce administrative burden, increase payments, and enable high-quality care at scale. Check us out on our website—if you’re in Texas and need care, we’d love to help.

Hi everyone! We’re Yash, Danny, and Arthur— and we're on a mission to build the largest network of psychiatric providers in the country and integrate LLMs into every facet of delivering care, ensuring patients can access high-quality, affordable treatment at scale.

💔 Problem: Finding an available psychiatrist who accepts insurance can be brutal

In the United States, only around half of psychiatrists accept commercial health insurance, compared to over 90% of other medical specialists. This rate is even lower for specific insurance plans. Moreover, less than 20% of psychiatrists are accepting new patients. For those who are, the median wait time for an in-person initial appointment is over 60 days.

Many psychiatrists avoid taking insurance because the financial and administrative burdens outweigh the benefits. After covering administrative staff (scheduling, billing, patient support), paying for office space, and disputing insurance denials and underpayments, little profit remains for the psychiatrist.

For patients with serious mental health concerns, this lack of access and affordability can literally cost lives. The three of us deeply care about mental health and have personally experienced the difficulty of finding high-quality, affordable psychiatric care for ourselves, our family, and our friends.

🌱 Opportunity: A huge and growing need

Post-COVID, around 32% of U.S. adults experience mental health conditions annually, equating to about 83 million people. Approximately 50% of these individuals, or 42 million, do not receive necessary treatment. About 25% of those with mental health issues, or 10 million people, require psychiatric care (rather than perhaps just therapy). With a conservative annual cost of $2,500 per patient, this translates to an unmet market opportunity of approximately $25 billion. The demand for psychiatric services is growing at about 4.1% annually. Additionally, over 60% of U.S. counties lack a psychiatrist, leaving these areas particularly underserved.

💡 Solution: Using tech + AI to make high-quality psychiatric care viable and scalable

Legion Health is a network of psychiatric providers delivering world-class care to insured patients. Our software and AI dramatically reduce costs by minimizing capital expenses through telehealth and lowering operational costs with AI agents that enhance workflows and manage patient care with minimal human intervention.

By directly hiring our providers, we can quickly implement technology in a sandbox environment. Furthermore, as we scale, our stacking LLM agents continuously improve, enhancing care quality and patient experience. Unlike other VC-backed mental health companies (e.g., Betterhelp, Cerebral), we 1) accept insurance, 2) emphasize high-quality and ethical care, and 3) have genuine AI expertise.

At Legion Health, most patients:

• See a psychiatric provider within a week.
• Pay $30 or less out of pocket.
• Pick up their medication from the pharmacy within 24 hours.
• Receive rapid responses to messages from their provider or our front desk.
• Actually see an improvement in their mental health due to high-quality treatment.

📢 Asks

1. If you or someone you know in Texas needs psychiatric care, we'd love to help and gather feedback for product improvement.
   • Sign up or refer patients using this link: access this link
2. We're hiring mission-driven, world-class individuals for the following roles. We’d love introductions to any potential candidates in your network:
   • AI Engineer (preferably with experience in autonomous driving or machine learning)
   • Technical Growth/Product Marketing Lead (preferably consumer-focused)
   • Product Designer (preferably consumer-focused)
   • Founding Clinical Operations Lead (ideally, a tech-savvy mental health leader)
3. Share this post! Please help spread the word, as many people struggle to find accessible, high-quality psychiatric care.
4. Connect us with Providers (psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners), Patients, and Payer Leadership in Texas.
   • quick blurb to copy and paste: A team of psychiatrists and Princeton alums are building Legion Health, a high-quality, AI-enabled psychiatry network where patients can receive care from a provider who takes their insurance. Check them out and contact founders@legion.health for more.