Origins in Advocacy and Access

The vision for PsychConcierge began taking shape in the early 2000s, during a time when many insurance plans covered only six sessions of therapy, an approach that starkly underestimated the complexity of mental health care. While legislation such as the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 and the Affordable Care Act of 2010 helped expand coverage, reimbursement for therapy has remained inconsistent and inadequate. Rates vary dramatically between insurance companies, and they continue to decline over time, making the business side of therapy financially unstable and often unsustainable.

Limits of Insurance-Driven Care

Equally concerning, insurance does not typically compensate providers for the critical clinical work that occurs between sessions, namely, case conceptualization, care coordination, and treatment planning. In fact, in-network mental health providers are often constricted to billing insurance companies by a limited set of billing codes (called Current Procedural Terminology or CPT codes) established by the American Medical Association (AMA), which often neglects to account for much of the clinicians' demanding efforts to guide patients to a better place. These intersession efforts are essential to effective care but are often deprioritized in traditional, insurance-driven models. Many clinicians, facing both time and financial constraints, are forced to abandon this cornerstone of best practice.

Despite well-intentioned policy reforms, including the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 and the Affordable Care Act of 2010, access to high-quality, sustained mental health care remains uneven. While these legislative efforts aimed to reduce coverage disparities, they have not fully addressed the systemic undercompensation of time-intensive and intersession clinical work. Reimbursement structures continue to undervalue the relational and cognitive labor inherent in effective therapy and psychiatric care (Beronio, Glied, & Frank, 2014). As a result, many clinicians are forced to choose between financial viability and clinical integrity, an unacceptable tradeoff that PsychConcierge was designed to reject.