How to Scale Mental Health Care Without Losing the Science with Dr. Soo Jeong Youn

And then what is different is like the language, right? And like, how do you think about outcomes in a different way? How do you talk about it? How do you present it? What are the metrics that are of interest?

So two questions, just so one question, this is a, I know the word vertical is like jargon in business world.

And I hear people say it, but I really don't know what vertical alignment actually means.

So what does that mean?

In this case, I'm actually thinking from a implemented science perspective, it's like aligning all, if you think about, um, the different layers, right.

Within, um, an innovation expansion or implementation, you have the patient, the provider, the department that the patient is part of, um, like then the other layers, like what is a department housed within what kind of a setting? Then you have like, you know, other layers, like the policy, blah, blah, blah.

So I'm thinking when I say vertical alignment, that all those layers from an implementation perspective are aligning.

They're all wanting the same thing.

There's no competing needs.

The provider wants this, but the patient wants these.

So there are odds.

But that the end goal of the product and what we're evaluating and tracking towards, there's, yeah, everyone wants the same thing.

And it's not that like this layer wants something else completely different or slightly different enough that we'll put anything else at odds.

So that felt...

Very strong from the get-go.

And that was something that we kept aligning on as the product did really well and it scaled.

We expanded to primary care.

We expanded to another organization.

By the time I left, we had trained hundreds of primary care providers.

We had seen thousands of patients go through our program.

And that was like, what really helped address potentially any, like, well, like we can expand right away because blah, blah, blah, like, yes.

And like, what if we don't have those elements ready on the product side, but we have these other workaround ways, can we still do it? So it made the problem solving much faster and easier.

Because everyone knew why we were doing the things and the output, the program itself was going to be addressing all the needs of all the people that were involved.

In listening to you talk, you know, I've done some work with like groups working with the government and this sort of thing.

And I think one of the challenges is often that the sort of the stakeholders being like the funders and this sort of thing, it's like today they want... x and y and then so you go and collect those data or do that sort of thing and then you go back and go to report back on it nine months later and now they want c and d and it's like so you're kind of constantly i don't know if chasing your tail i don't know if that metaphor works but you're kind of like it is sort of like it is a little bit like the the cat going after the laser pointer