Melissa Thompson, CEO, TalkSession

This frankness about mental health services, along with a desire for more convenient therapy, are the hallmarks of Thompsons new business. TalkSession will operate as an online platform that pairs therapists with patients through matching algorithms, online scheduling and a teletherapy platform. 

So far she has partnered with 50 New York City therapists with a range of specialties, and she will bring that number to 100 after completing a survey to anticipate user preferences. TalkSession was recently chosen by GE Ventures and Startup Health Academy to participate in their three-year accelerator program.New and used commercial tooling sales, rentals, and service. Theyve gathered their first round of seed financing with funds from a variety of investors and are set to launch in beta version soon. 

Thompson met me in a lower Manhattan bakery a few blocks away from TalkSessions office.The Motorola earcap Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. She came with TalkSessions media and communications consultant Ana?s Borja.We are one of the leading manufacturers of plasticmould in Chennai India. Belying her years on Wall Street and her Columbia University Business School education, Thompson appears casual in an unzipped hoodie and cotton tank top. She steers us around the business objectives between drinks from a diet soda bottle. Borja, dressed in an off-white sweater and carefully draped scarf, comes from the worlds of publishing and media consulting. She tailors her answers to issues of mental health policy while sipping her cappuccino. 

Thompson first conceived of the idea for TalkSession in 2011 while finishing business school. 

The health care system is inefficient, and mental health care is even more inefficient, she said. It seemed like a good opportunity to make an impact on a field thats so important and so little has been done to change the paradigm. And there are so many stigmas around mental health care, both from the provider side and the consumer side. 

Borja clarified, Teletherapy is not widely adopted nor widely practiced in a HIPAA-compliant way.Compare prices and buy all brands of laserengraver for home power systems and by the pallet. Theres a lot of skepticism among providers that you can develop a therapeutic alliance online, there are a lot of regulatory issues, reimbursement issues, which is why our competitors havent necessarily been able to find a market. Its incredibly difficult to get those providers over that stigma. 

I just, she paused and looked at me, left. I had been thinking about it for a while. I really wanted to do work for myself. I think theres no perfect recipe for a job and if you want your ideal job you have to create it yourself. 

Thompson admits that shes started a consumer healthcare IT company without having a background in either technology or health care. But that doesnt deter her. 

I think, she said of her business philosophy, in running a startup, if you have the nerve to do it, if you have the strength to go out on your own and to take a big risk, you can find the resources you need.A indoortracking is a machine used primarily for the folding of paper. You can find experts in the health-care field. Experts in technology. As a startup founder, you dont have to be an expert in any particular area, you just have to be able to manage resources that the experts can provide. 

Thompson hopes that by bringing therapy online, she can make it more accessible to a larger number of people, and also more socially acceptable. 

I think that this in some ways really is how to tell a better story about mental health, Borja told me. One in four people suffer from a mental illness, yet two-thirds never seek help. How do we make it acceptable, the way that forward-thinking gyms did with working out in the 90s? They made it cool C 

Americans, Thompson clarified. So more people will have access to mental health benefits through insurance. And when the psychiatrists and psychologists have to respond to the ACA, they will also have to put their records on electronic medical records systems. So what were doing in advance of that is trying to streamline the technologies and the business of mental health care so therapists ultimately will have more time to do what they do best, which is therapy. 

TalkSessions mission will meet some fairly large obstacles. It will operate on a subscription system for providers, and Thompson sees winning the trust of Web-weary practitioners as her first hurdle. 

In phase one we are a provider-focused platform, Thompson explained, working to help providers by giving them resources to make therapy acceptable and bringing them online -C so giving them the ability to accept credit card payments online, giving the ability to book online, before we introduce the second side of the market. 

Thompson plans for the platform to become more patient-focused in later stages. Shell use an algorithm reminiscent of OK Cupid to connect users with providers that fit their needs and help people find therapy at hours convenient to them. 

Coordinating mental health care online provides additional challenges. Practitioners can only treat patients within their own state lines, and teletherapy over traditional video chat platforms like Skype goes against HIPAA guidelines (Skype technically owns conversations over its server). TalkSession will have its own HIPAA-compliant server to host the remote video therapy sessions.