Moody Abdul Podcast Transcript
Moody Abdul joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Moody Abdul. Moody Abdul is the co-founder and CEO of Klarify, an AI-powered platform helping therapists reduce administrative burdens and spend more time focused on client care. Inspired by his own experience with therapy and the impact it had on his life, Moody co-founded Klarify to address one of the biggest challenges facing mental health professionals today, the growing amount of time spent on documentation, insurance claims, compliance, and other administrative work that takes clinicians away from their patients.
Klarify is backed by Y Combinator, one of the world’s leading startup accelerators Well, good afternoon, Moody. Welcome to the show.
Moody Abdul: Thank you. Great to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend, I appreciate it. You’re hailing out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I’m in Kansas City, so I appreciate you kind of traversing one time zone and probably about nine hundred miles away, so, I appreciate that.
So let’s just jump right into your first question, Moody. You’ve had a real founder’s arc, enterprise sales at LinkedIn, then co-founding CircleBack.ai as an AI meeting assistant, and now Clarify. But you’ve said the real spark came from your own experience with therapy and a personal breakthrough combining therapy and AI tools.
Can you take us back to that moment and how it turned into a company you built for the therapist who changed your life?
Moody Abdul: Yeah, I grew up in a family that is well-versed with mental health issues. I was born in Canada, but my, my parents and all my uncles and aunts were refugees from Lebanon during the civil war.
So, any sort of diagnosis you can think of, we have it in my family: schizophrenia, bipolar, we have autism. And I grew up around this culture of mental health is not really something that you work on. But growing up in Canada, I had a, a different view on that. And so when I was in my twenties, I went to therapy for the first time, and it completely changed my relationship with my father, who I had maybe a fifteen-year broken relationship at that point, and with my partner at the time, which has helped me become a better now husband.
I just got married last week, so that was a huge milestone for me. And I really credit the therapist, the different therapists in my life for helping me be a better person and heal the relationships in my life. While I was building CircleBack, my own therapist said she wished she could use it. And CircleBack was a meeting note-taker that, you know, would listen to your calls and write you a summary but she highlighted how that wouldn’t work for her in terms of regulations and just the different workflows she had.
And I knew that I had to give back to the people that have given so much to me. So I left CircleBack, started Klarify, and now, we’ve helped thousands of therapists with hundreds of thousands of therapy sessions automate all the drudgery and the, the work that takes away time and energy from them helping people.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I love the story. Your backstory’s just amazing. I think moving out of that chaotic environment, you talked about the Lebanon Civil War, and that’s gotta be traumatic for anybody that was in, in that, of course. But you, you moved to Canada, and you did have some history there with- in the family of some mental health issues, and you worked through that with s- with therapists, and of course, along the way, you built some company, Well Circle back as, as one, obviously.
And, and your therapist particularly wanted to utilize something like that, and that’s kind of the genesis for everything that you’ve done. And you’re really giving back. You learned a lot, you came through a lot, a lot of challenges, and now you’ve actually giving back to the world to make the world a better place.
So I love the backstory. Moody, you’ve drawn a sharp line between software that stores what therapists do and software that can actually do it, noting that legacy tools store notes but can’t use them, schedule clients but can’t find new ones, submit claims but can’t fight denials. What does that shift from a system of record to an AI agent that takes action actually look like day to day for a therapist?
Moody Abdul: It is a huge change in mental model because up until this point in, in really human history, we don’t even have to look that far back. The internet is a relatively new invention, right? 1993, didn’t really take off until the 2000s, then the smartphone era. But for the last ten, 15 years, software has looked relatively the same, which is click this button, store this information, or click this button to move this information from here to here.
And that is, how you can generally boil down most software. AI has made it so that you can actually leave a task with these AI agents, and it understands who you are and what you need done, and it can then go do it, which is fundamentally different than anything we’re used to. The only comparable thing is when you hire an employee and you tell them, “Hey, it is now your job to submit the claims and fight the denials.”
But most therapists don’t have that privilege. The majority of them are independent contractors working for a clinic or multiple clinics while also building their clinic on the side, so they’re not even used to really having that privilege. And when they are, you have labor and people that you gotta train, a lot of things kinda slip through the crack.
So what we’ve built and are continuing to build is a new version of software that actually does the work for you, but we make a clear line between what kind of work should the AI do and not do. We’re automating every job for a therapist other than therapy itself. So their marketing, automated. Insurance claims and denials, automated.
Their accounting and taxes, automated. These are the things, this is the way that the future’s gonna be for pretty much every single profession. We’re just focused on therapists because of how meaningful it is to us.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Really do. That’s amazing. You did kind of go back through how apps traditionally were built over the years, and they’re all the same, and people just like to scale apps and, and sell apps.
But with your app, with AI, of course, you’ve really disrupted the app market right in this space with therapists. Using agentic AI, you talked about that you’re able to bring all the note-taking, scheduling, marketing, billing, claims, bring it all together under one roof, and you call this your new version of software, automating everything for the therapist except the therapy part, and I think that’s amazing.
That lets the practitioner focus on their skill set and what they went to school for. So, I appreciate that. Moody, one of Klarify’s boldest promises is automatically fighting insurance denials, extracting diagnostic codes from session notes, auto-populating claims, and pushing back on denials. Insurance is notoriously the most painful and opaque part of running a practice.
How does that actually work under the hood, and how far can automation realistically go against payers?
Moody Abdul: Payers and insurance companies are incentivized to make this system complex, right? Their business model is how much premiums can we collect from people who have health insurance, and how little can we pay out?
And then that difference is their profit. Of course, they have to actually pay people out, and they do. Insurance companies don’t have the highest margins, so they are actually paying out billions of dollars. But what happens in, in a therapist’s world is, first of all, getting credentialed is a nightmare.
Ge- like being able to even accept insurance from somebody, you need to go to that insurance company’s website, find their form, fill out their form, submit their form. Sometimes they won’t even let you be part of network. Then you have to do that for every insurance company that your clients have. Each insurance company has a different process, a different form.
These things take hours to understand and do, and then weeks to actually get results on. Then you have, once you’re actually in-network, submitting the insurance claim is easy-ish. Typical software now allows you to do that with one button. But when the insurance company denies your claim, and they do quite often I was looking at CMS data that showed one in five claims were denied.
Less than ten percent were appealed. And then of the ones that were appealed, forty-four percent were actually a win for the practitioner. So you can imagine how much money they’re leaving on the table because they don’t appeal these denials. Now, why don’t they appeal the denial? Because that process is also such a nightmare.
Call the company, be on hold for three hours. “Oh, you were talking to the wrong department. Talk to this department.” Now you’re on hold for another three hours, all for a hundred dollar claim. And so what most people do is they don’t even try. They don’t even try to appeal a lot of these denials So what happened is this entire industry s- was created called RCM, revenue cycle management, that were entire agencies of people who would literally offload this burden from doctors, clinicians, therapists, and they would take a percentage of the collected claims, something between 5 to 8%.
And now that industry has been actually offshored to India. Most of the companies that are doing this work, their whole staff and their whole team is in India, and they’re the ones who are calling the insurance companies, trying to appeal, taking a percentage of what they collect. And what we’ve essentially done is used AI to do that work.
Call the insurance company with an AI voice agent, talk to the person, provide the information. What information they give the AI, maybe they say, “Hey, you were missing,” or, “You had the wrong CPT code.” The AI is smart enough to notify the therapist of that and with one click, fix it, send it back to the insurance company.
And so we’re basically offshoring the offshoring we did. Instead of moving all of these jobs to teams in India, we now have AI that is doing most of this work.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Love that. And I was in healthcare for a long time on the tech side, so I know all about this stuff. Here in the US, it’s very similar.
The insurance industry certainly is big on paying as little as possible. We all know that. But you talked about this whole process, getting licensed practitioners through that first barrier, which is getting credentialed, is just, just as hard as heck. But once you’re in that network, as you mentioned, I think you said one in five claims are denied, and then less than 10% of those claims are appealed, so that appeal process is just a nightmare.
And of course, we have the revenue cycle management. That process and industry, it’s, it’s become big, and you talked about offshoring. I just love the fact that you’re leveraging AI in your app to handle all this, and really you’re bringing it back in-house for the therapist. And again, it’s, it’s just awesome.
I love talking about the things that our people do to make the world a better place. The last question I have for you, you host The Future of Therapy podcast, so you’re constantly in conversation with clinicians, researchers, and innovators about where this is all heading. If you look out maybe to 2030, the year 2030, how do you see the day-to-day life of a therapist changing, and what has to be true for AI to demystify mental health and expand access without compromising the irreplaceable human core of the work?
Moody Abdul: First of all, when you said 2030, I thought that was like 10 years away ’cause I’m so used to I feel like I think about 2020 like it was, a few months ago. And yeah. Wow, that’s four years from now. ChatGPT came out three years ago, something like that? Yep. Actually it will be four years this November.
So, the world has already drastically changed, but what we’re seeing is when- whenever you have new technology, there’s this huge curve of innovators, early adopters, the main bulk of people using it, and then the laggards. What we’re seeing now is, in fact, I think only 10% of therapists have even used AI for their work.
So we’re pretty early here. But in 2030, four years from now, I can imagine the system that I’m talking about is not really that special. Every software will have like, this all-in-one, we will do everything and anything for you because software becomes so easy to create. And what really is special is the community that you’re able to build around, and the value that you can provide beyond software.
Now, what I think is actually gonna happen, which is a bit of a hot take because the first headline that came out when ChatGPT was released was basically, “Therapists are done for.” Everybody’s gonna automate therapists. I actually think that the last jobs that are going to exist in the further than 2030 are going to be these emotional labor jobs, the things that people value because they’re a human, not because the information that is needed or the, the task that is needed.
For example, you don’t really care if somebody is building your desk for you. You just want the desk So you don’t care really if it’s a robot or if it’s handmade. Some people do. They have that, that luxury to be able to afford that and just the interest. But I actually think the, the job of a therapist is so core to being a human that no matter how much AI gets better at doing the tasks that resemble therapy, people are still gonna wanna talk to a human being, and you’re gonna want a human being that understands what they’re doing when they’re talking to you.
And so I actually see that AI is gonna expand the access because it’s gonna make… it’s gonna reduce the stigma behind mental health. We have eight hundred million people that are using ChatGPT, and the number one use case is for things that resemble therapy. And what happens then? They go, “Oh, well, let me upgrade this experience to seeing an actual human being.”
In fact, the, the companies like ChatGPT and Claude are already starting to change their algorithm so that it refers people to seek a therapist when it notices something is, once they’ve reached like a certain threshold of the conversation. So I actually think people are gonna be accessing therapy more than they ever have.
It’s gonna be easier than it ever was to find the right therapist. ‘Cause I can tell you, like one of the biggest issues right now is how do you even find the right therapist for you? You can’t just talk to any therapist and have them change your life. You need to find the right person that understands you, that has the same sort of cultural elements and vibe that you can build that trust, or as they call it, therapeutic alliance.
So long story short, I actually think that therapy’s gonna be more needed than ever because of how many jobs we’re gonna automate and a lot of people are gonna be suffering from an identity perspective, hopefully not from a resources and poverty perspective because I hope we as a society figure out how do we even function if jobs are fully automated or most jobs are fully automated.
So I, I think that more and more people are gonna need therapy, and therapists are gonna be more accessible and equipped than ever because of the tools like Clarify
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And yeah, that, that, those are some really good insights. I know you talked about 2030 and beyond. You know, software’s gonna be obviously a lot more easier to create, but the benefit out of this is AI will actually expand access to therapists and will help remove some of that stigma you talked about of therapy.
But really, no matter how good AI gets, and this is what I took away from your, you know, just speaking with you just now, is those last jobs that will still exist and be done by human will actually be those positions that require that em- emotional space with humans that we have today. And I know therapists will be one of those, and I think that’s really, really cool, and I just love where this is going.
Regardless of how AI turns out, I, I hope we don’t turn into The Matrix or- … you know, s- or Skynet, but I truly think that there is a lot of benefit here in the future if we can all keep us focused on ethics, which is so, so important. Moody, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Moody Abdul: Thank you so much, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Moody Abdul Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
