Flipping the Switch on Digital Mental Health Care: The Cigna Group Ventures and Headspace Partnership

Headspace: On-demand Virtual Mental Health Services 

Roughly 1 in 4 Americans have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, and 50% of adults with a mental health condition don’t receive treatment.¹ Contributing to the lack of treatment are challenges with navigating the care process and determining effective treatment in a current environment where the demand for care is higher than the supply of providers.

Headspace is a leading provider of high-quality, cost-effective, on-demand mental health services anchored by the mission of providing every person access to lifelong mental health support. Members have access to a full continuum of mental health care right from their phone, including self-guided mindfulness and meditation content, mental health coaching, therapy, psychiatric care and EAP services. 

Headspace is focused on rethinking the delivery of mental health care not just in terms of digital care versus in-person care, but in helping patients get preventive mental health care to address issues before they evolve into greater challenges.  

Aligning to Accelerate Digital Mental Health Services

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, The Cigna Group recognized a need for digital behavioral health services that could provide early interventions for patients with mental health conditions. The behavioral health business, housed under the Cigna Healthcare division of The Cigna Group at the time, was looking to provide digital mental health solutions for health plans and their members and needed a partner. In 2020, The Cigna Group Ventures invested in Ginger, a provider of on-demand mental health support. Shortly thereafter in 2021, Ginger merged with Headspace, a provider of digital meditation and mindfulness tools, to an end-to-end mental health delivery system. Around the same time, The Cigna Group’s behavioral health business became a pillar of Evernorth Health Services, a division of The Cigna Group. Today, clients have an option to add Headspace services into Evernorth’s configurable navigation offerings.  

Looking back at The Cigna Group Ventures’ initial investment, Headspace CEO Russell Glass said, “The Cigna Group Ventures was very early to raise their hand and recognize just how critical this is – the importance of ensuring everybody gets access to high-quality mental health care if they need it. And perhaps more importantly, ensuring the care is effective, rooted in measurement, and delivers strong clinical outcomes.” 

Headspace understood what we were trying to solve in terms of getting people into care but doing it in an affordable way. That was something that set them apart from other players in the space at the time.

– Eva Borden, President of Evernorth Behavioral Health

Key Milestones of the Strategic Partnership 

• August 2020 The Cigna Group Ventures invests in Ginger 
• April 2021 Ginger launches as in-network benefit for Evernorth Behavioral Health customers and Cigna Healthcare behavioral health customers 
• October 2021 Ginger finalizes merger with Headspace
• March 2022 Evernorth Behavioral Health launches enhanced EAP with Confide Behavioral Health Navigator featuring Headspace

Scaling Up at Exceptional Speed to Meet Growing Demand 

Evernorth Behavioral Health knew it wanted to make Headspace’s services available to its national network of health plans including Cigna Healthcare’s commercial and individual and family (IFP) plans. Previously, Headspace had been focused on direct to employer relationships and would need to pivot to work within Evernorth Behavioral Health’s ecosystem. The teams were aligned on the work needed to be done including establishing a behavioral health provider contracting mechanism and a claims reimbursement process. Less than a year later, Headspace was launched as an in-network benefit for all health plans through Evernorth Behavioral Health, including Cigna Healthcare’s behavioral health customers enrolled in employer-sponsored and individual and family plan (IFP).  

“Evernorth Behavioral Health’s impact on millions of Americans’ health made them an ideal partner for us and accelerated our ability to scale and learn together,” Glass said.  

For Evernorth Behavioral Health, having an established partner who was in-network with payers was a huge differentiator when the demand for virtual care began to grow rapidly during the pandemic.  

“We were both cutting our teeth on the digital pieces. That was a first for us and being able to have the venture partner meant there was a level of transparency that we might not have had if it was just a vended relationship,” said Eva Borden, President of Evernorth Behavioral Health. 

The speed at which Headspace was able to scale to launch to a national network of health plans is almost unheard of for our industry and it happened during a time when it was extremely critical with the start of the pandemic and the rise of behavioral health concerns.

– Rachel Anderson, Principal, Portfolio Partnerships, The Cigna Group Ventures

Reducing Obstacles to Behavioral Health Care 

When Headspace merged with Ginger to form one end-to-end platform, it created an opportunity to provide more entryways for people to begin their mental health care journeys and allowed both Headspace and Evernorth Behavioral Health to reach an even larger audience.  

“The merger enabled us – alongside Evernorth Behavioral Health – to start thinking about how we focus more on prevention and catch needs early, before they become acute,” Glass said. 

In 2022, Evernorth Behavioral Health and Headspace worked together to create an integrated Employee Assistance Program (EAP) benefit with Evernorth’s Confide Behavioral Health Navigator aimed at helping employees find the right mental care in the right setting at the right time. Both teams recognized opportunity and need in the marketplace for an EAP benefit that’s more aligned with the needs of today’s workers, which includes increased demand for digital behavioral health support, and it was a natural extension of the partnership.  

“It’s a next generation EAP that is more equipped to serve the lives of clients and employers with our capabilities fully integrated within that ecosystem. We’re now able to deliver high quality, 24/7 mental health support that is cost effective and clinically effective,” Glass said. 

As the partnership continues, Evernorth Behavioral Health and Headspace are excited to pursue new opportunities to expand access to a wide range of mental health care services to new audiences and work toward the goal of removing barriers to care.

Coming together through the investment, rather than a vendor relationship, assured us that we’ve got a partner that is really invested in our success. That’s been immensely valuable because with any partnership and large company like The Cigna Group, it can be tough to navigate. But we have people at The Cigna Group Ventures that we can call with questions and know we have their support.

– Russell Glass, CEO of Headspace