Trevor Colhoun Podcast Transcript
Trevor Colhoun joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Trevor Colhoun. Trevor Colhoun is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of TPN Health, a national clinician network and care navigation platform dedicated to strengthening the quality, integrity, and accessibility of behavioral health care.
Trevor founded TPN Health with a clear mission to build infrastructure that elevates clinical standards while expanding access to high quality mental health and addiction treatment. He recognized that despite the growing demand for behavioral health services, the system lacked alignment between providers, organizations, and patients.
TPN Health was created to close that gap by rigorously credentialing clinicians supporting evidence-based care and enabling trusted partnerships across the continuum of care. Well, good afternoon, Trevor. Welcome to the show.
Trevor Colhoun: Thank you, Brian. Excited to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. I know you’re in New Orleans, you travel a lot.
I’m in Kansas City, so I just appreciate you making the time today. I know it’s hard to traverse calendars, especially the farther apart we are. So again, I’m so grateful for you and Trevor. If you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump right in. You founded TPN Health to strengthen the quality and accessibility of behavioral healthcare.
What experiences or observations in the industry led you to start the company and pursue this mission?
Trevor Colhoun: First, there was a personal journey of a family member that went down a pretty significant behavioral health process related to facility needs and addiction. And through that I really saw through the lens of how analog and unorganized this space was.
And I think some of the interesting things that we learned, which is really. You know, before we even started the company was really just thinking about behavioral health and what are the issues. As most people talk about stigma, most people talk about access. And really we learned that the issue of behavioral health is the value proposition where behavioral health doesn’t really demonstrate a value proposition in terms of.
I have a behavioral health issue. I need to enter into the market. I need to see a therapist. I need to understand how many times I need to see that therapist until I get recovering. And if I can’t answer those questions, then I don’t really know what the cost is, and so I’m not gonna enter that market.
So that those were the, that was really the big a aha. That is the question that we’re trying to answer in behavioral health.
Brian Thomas: And that’s really tough. I’ve been in healthcare on the tech side for many years and we got to work and help manage organizations that had large behavioral health centers are connected to, and that was certainly a challenge.
But what I like about this is right off the bat, this personal experience, you talked about your journey as you called it. Behavioral health, what is that value prop? ’cause it is tough. You don’t know what the costs are to manage and run an organization like this. And there’s a lot of stigma behind it.
And a lot of things come with behavioral health, not just, mental health issues, but you know, sometimes addiction, et cetera. And I, I’m just very excited to hear more about this, but also very grateful for people like you that are trying to make the world a better place. So, thank you. Trevor, if I jump to the next question here, TPN Health focuses heavily on clinician credentialing and quality oversight.
Why is building trusted clinical infrastructure so critical for improving outcomes in mental health and addiction treatment?
Trevor Colhoun: Well, it goes even further back. So when you look at, as we talk about the issue being the inability to show value based care or value proposition for behavioral health services to the market, meaning I as a payer don’t understand what the value prop is if I pay into the market and what the outcomes they’re going to be if I send my insured life through, or I even individually even paying for myself.
I don’t understand. There’s not. Transparency, access, and connectivity into the market. So, as we enter into the market, we identified the most important group in behavioral health, being the individual provider. So, when we first started on TP and we essentially built a bespoke LinkedIn for behavioral health providers to them, have a user account, connect, engage, refer to each other, and through that process.
As they come on, we verify them against their state licensure boards, so they might be licensed in many boards and essentially credentialing them through that process. We also offer a tremendous amount of continued education for them to maintain and advance themselves as an individual provider, but the result of that activity, so really the behavioral science of the marketplace industry is we’ve allowed individual providers and aggregation to digitize them on this platform and thus have extreme accurate data.
At real time on their availability, the demographics they serve, the geographic area they serve, are they credentialed? Who are they connected with? And by providing them with a lot of digital utility in a digital home, we’re able to thus. Collectively take them and bring this information to payers so payers know who’s available, what’s going on, who’s insured, who’s this, that, the other.
So really bringing transparency to the market, which this market completely lacked. So, it lacked that infrastructure. And that’s, that’s the nexus of TPN.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And you’re absolutely right. We talked about in the first question is it is really hard to show this value prop in behavioral health.
This is just the system in general. There’s lack of access, a lot of questions, lack of connectivity, transparency, et cetera. So. The value prop is hard to really uncover there, but you’ve been able to digitally connect everybody and make this easier, including the payers so that you can have some insights on what’s going on.
But that digital connection is so important in this space. Trevor, many digital health startups focus on technology first, but you emphasize clinical credibility and ethical practice standards. How do you balance innovation with maintaining rigorous clinical integrity?
Trevor Colhoun: Well, I think that first it’s the process, and especially in this market as behavioral health providers, it’s the process of, of building a digital relationship and trust.
This is an industry that, so it was an easy decision for us. This is an industry that doesn’t trust the new player, hasn’t really been able to connect and engage at scale or in any way with the insurance market. And so when we think about leveraging and enabling. Technology. We think about how, do we take an analog action into a digital action and do it at scale and do and really run that provider’s life through the process.
AI, if that’s where you’re going to kind of think and talk about, really cut its teeth significantly at scale in the financial markets because data’s ubiquitous and readily available and no one really owns, for the most part that data, except for maybe some of this, the large wirehouses or exchanges. But it’s easy to get that data.
For behavioral health, there isn’t. Data right there isn’t that connectivity. So, we’re both mining that data and aggregating that data and then providing access to actually make some of those smart decisions. Now we, you didn’t ask this, but we don’t condone support using artificial intelligence or those processes or agents in therapeutic.
Modalities or interventions with the member life or the, or the patient. But we do use agents within to optimize the process and efficiencies of connectivity.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate your insights there. The process of building this, as you called it, this digital relationship and trust is so important in this industry.
Industry’s hard to crack, but you looked at this differently, I think you mentioned taking an analog approach to a digital way to do this. You go in there, you pull that data together, you do the mining, aggregating and providing the data. Again, doing that digital connectivity to bring things to light. So the process is smoother and there’s more transparency, and I do appreciate that.
And Trevor, the last question of the day. As we look ahead to the future, how do you see behavioral healthcare evolving over the next decade? And what role will platforms like TPN Health play in shaping a more accessible, accountable system of care?
Trevor Colhoun: Well, you know, let’s look at what behavioral health is right now.
It’s a black market, right? It’s, and it has the same aspects of a black market. So if I don’t have. If I have a scarcity of supply or in lack of access to supply, meaning providers, then you see sub-markets paying cash and paying over rates on cash or driving that demand. So you really see that happening in the behavioral health market where providers tend to mostly just take cash and be outside of the insurance network.
And so, the pain points that are occurring in the traditional insurance market is we are, as employee. People or maybe buyers of insurance are already paying for behavior health services, but we’re not receiving the access because the inability to produce accurate databases and accurate provider networks to these member lives.
So where this is going is quite exciting in behavior health. We think that this is really where we’re drive driving is this gen three process, a gen three network and connectivity and behavioral health where. We’ll have the access and connectivity to the providers. We’re already, have about 15% penetration rate to the overall market on the provider side, but with that penetration, we’re able to pay the provider more and a more, ’cause we contract them on our paper so we’re able to contract them at a higher rate.
In return because we directly connect the provider to the payer and we handle all of the what is traditionally seen in the marketplace of vendor services, of credentialing and adjudication and attestation and, and network compliance, adequacy, and accuracy. And I go on and on about all these vendors that help out this process.
We cut that completely out. So, by cutting that out, we’re able to increase the pay on paper to the provider. We’re able to pay them faster through an insurance process, less than 15 days. We’re able to lower the deniability of claims, and then on the payer side, we’re instantly able to lower their aggregate behavioral health costs year over year from us too.
They were the prior year by 15%. That also doesn’t include things we haven’t talked about where we do not provide directories to member lives. We provide tech enabled human care, licensed care navigators to human lives to help them drive them through the clinical path to recovery. That also reduces cost significantly because they get direct access to care navigators that drive them away from high cost.
Realms that they might choose to fall into on behavioral health issues, like emergency rooms, primary care docs and other areas. We drive, we catch them in the, in the member lives right away. We directly connect with them. They all have an SMS text number they can text into if they’re in our network on the member life side.
And then lastly, which we’re very excited about Brian, is the outcome. So, I talked earlier about the value prop. Value proposition really comes when you have connectivity data and the analysis of those two things. And now that we’re able to do this at scale and take hundreds of thousands of lives up to millions of lives and track their outcomes through this process, which will be unconnected to the providers, so the providers.
Do not have to be involved in this process. We actually track the lives through, through our SMS engagement, we can actually start to measure individually how providers are doing. We’re able to measure not only how the life is improving through the process, the human being. But also how the payer can actually track the cost that they save, not only with their behavior, health costs, but then also bleeding into how this saves out of their physical health costs.
You know, the hospital bills the, the, uh, of that nature. So, we’re quite excited and not far away from that reality at all, at TPN. And so, the main result in winner you, you’ve got three constituents here. You’ve got the payers. Which is a big group in different categories. You’ve got the providers and then you’ve got the member lives.
But at this point, the member lives can now feel comfortable to participate in insurance, in with their networks to get the services they need and start to understand the value prop. Position of this because they’re driven by professionals through, through this process. And so we’re, we’re quite excited about the future of behavioral health.
We’re excited about where we’re positioned and our growth has been tremendous in terms of, providers that are joining the movement, if you will, or joining us and our network to grow. We’re, we’ve already grown 20% this year alone from last year in terms of the size of our provider network. So it’s, it is an exciting future for all that participate with us.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. That’s a success story for sure. Just to highlight a few things, I know, as you called it behavioral health is kind of like a black market, and with that lack of supply providers and services, it does create high demand and then people start to circumvent the process and pay by cash, et cetera.
But those pain points, the lack of data, the lack of those networks and providers. You are able to really bring that all together and provide a be better payment structure for providers, faster turnaround on payments, and provide the payer information they need to process the claims. In the end. This is my favorite part, that reduction in cost, improve efficiency increases not only the services, but the outcome for the patient.
And that’s where I get really excited. As you know, I was in healthcare for a long time, so thank you so much for that. And Trevor, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Trevor Colhoun: Well, Brian, I’m grateful for the opportunity for us to talk about this and just thank you for that.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Trevor Colhoun Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
