How Community Behavioral Health Organizations and Tech Startups Drive Innovation Together

Published: July 2, 2026

I’ve spent years working at the intersection of behavioral health and technology, and I keep seeing the same missed opportunity. Too often, community behavioral health organizations (CBOs) and early-stage technology companies meet too late.

Community behavioral health organizations are where millions of Americans access mental health, substance use and intellectual and developmental (I/DD) care. Through community mental health centers, federally qualified health centers, certified community behavioral health clinics (CCBHCs), and nonprofit providers who have spent decades earning the trust of the communities they serve. If a new tech product works for that environment, with its constraints, its populations, its clinical realities, it can work nearly anywhere.

But by the time CBOs and tech startups connect, products are already built, assumptions are already baked in, and workflows are already designed, often for completely different environments. And then both sides are left trying to make something fit that was never designed to work together in the first place.

However, when these partnerships start earlier, well before the product is finished and before the strategy is locked in, the results are fundamentally different.

It’s a vision I share with the National Council for Mental Wellbeing: to bring together CBOs and tech startups to create new innovations. Together, I worked with Jeremy Atterman, Senior Director, Strategy and Venture at National Council, and we brought four pairs of community behavioral health leaders and early-stage technology founders on stage at NatCon in Denver to unpack what it actually looks like to build something in real time.

Adam Hutchinson (CEO/Founder at oVRcome) and Sam Nordberg (Chief of Behavioral Health at Reliant Medical Group)
Dani Bradley (Vice President, Clinical Affairs at Big Health) and Kristen Thome (Deputy Chief Clinical Officer at Jefferson Center for Mental Health)
Laura Vitale (CEO/Founder at Modality) and Drew Mullane (Assistant Executive Director of Behavioral Health at Westchester Jewish Community Services)
Blake Toolan (Director of Business Development at Simplifyance) and Valerie O’Connell (Director of Quality & Compliance at Axiom Care).

Here’s what we learned.

The Impact of Early Partnerships

The clearest lesson across all of these partnerships is simple: collaborating sooner leads to stronger, more effective outcomes down the line.

Adam Hutchinson, CEO of oVRcome, explained that like many startups, they must put nearly all their focus into solving a problem and building a product. There just isn’t enough time to get that product into the hands of people that need it.

That was the situation oVRcome found themselves in. Meanwhile, Sam Nordberg and Reliant Medical Group had spent years trying to solve for faster access to care and better treatment matching for patients.

oVRcome delivers personalized exposure therapy through virtual reality on a smartphone, fitting Reliant’s vision perfectly. Suddenly, a partnership was born.

That perfect fit would be so much harder to achieve when partnerships happen after a product is already complete. Connecting sooner allows both sides to shape the solution together, before either is too far down the rabbit hole.

Customization: Meeting Varied Community Needs

Community behavioral health is not a one-size-fits-all environment.

Drew Mullane at Westchester Jewish Community Services (WJCS) made this clear in his work with Laura Vitale, founder of Modality. What stood out to Mullane was Modality’s willingness to adapt their products to the populations WJCS serves.

WJCS employees use Modality’s AI simulation skill-building platform to practice motivational interviewing. But good motivational interviewing is never just one thing. Clinicians might be working with a parent trying to get their teenager into treatment, or someone in a criminal justice diversion program. WJCS needed a product that could train for each kind of scenario.

Modality’s product had to be more flexible. WJCS needed something more customizable. So that’s what Vitale and her team did: customized the product to fit the needs of WJCS.

Solutions built with community input simply work better, and since these innovators had their end-users at the table, they actually got used!

Building Trust: The Foundation of Successful Partnerships

In community behavioral health, relationships are everything.

Valerie O’Connell from Axiom Care described shopping around five or six different compliance software companies before choosing Simplifyance, a SaaS (software as a service) company that helps organizations simplify regulatory compliance and quality improvement. O’Connell said what made the decision easy was the mentality brought by Simplifyance, who told her, “You are the customer, no matter what that requires from us.”

O’Connell and Blake Toolan from Simplifyance said that level of responsiveness built trust quickly. Trust is what makes these partnerships viable and sustainable.

“I sometimes wonder if they have any other customers because they do so much to help us out,” O’Connell said. This is the kind of approach startups should be ready to take if they want to enter the complex world of healthcare and human services.

Innovation Through Intentional Risk

Jefferson Center is a CCBHC that serves everybody: all ages, all acuity levels, commercial and Medicaid, residential and outpatient. Deputy Chief Clinical Officer Kristen Thome is someone who regularly feels the pressure of serving these various populations.

Jefferson Center’s funding was shrinking, their workforce was stretched, and their old playbooks couldn’t keep up with demand. Thome knew the stakes were high!

Instead of playing it safe and waiting for conditions to improve, Thome began to work with Dani Bradley, Vice President of Clinical Affairs at Big Health. They created a space to pilot and test digital tools that Big Health offered, instead of stretching a tight budget on already-proven solutions.

Innovation flourished, and Jefferson Center was able to shape how the new tools functioned rather than trying to retrofit existing products to its needs. Sometimes the risk is not taking the needed action toward innovation, and this was one of those times.

Why Startups Should Prioritize Community Behavioral Health Organizations

I often see early-stage companies treat CBOs, Medicaid providers, and nonprofit systems as a late stop on their commercialization journey. Something to get to after they’ve nailed the employer market or payer channel.

But that’s really backwards.

CBOs are nottypical customers. They serve some of the most vulnerable people in our communities, including people navigating substance use disorders, serious mental illness, trauma, housing instability and other co-occurring challenges. The margins are thin and the regulatory environment is complex. Behavioral health isn’t a typical ‘product’ to begin with: the stakes of a failed technology experiment are human, not just financial.

So, when a community behavioral health organization decides to work with an early-stage tech company, they’re making a huge bet on the possibility that something that doesn’t fully exist yet might eventually help the people they serve.

Working with CBOs means startups will get

honest feedback faster
access to crucial cases you won’t see in corporate settings
the ability to build solutions that are more equitable and durable

If startups want to build something that lasts, they start with real communities and the partner with the CBOs that work with them.

Advice for Community Behavioral Health Leaders

CBOs work under enormous pressure. This includes regulatory scrutiny, workforce shortages, funding uncertainty, populations that can’t afford disruptions in care. The impulse to wait until a particular startup or product is proven is completely rational.

But, unfortunately, there’s a problem with that: if community behavioral health organizations only engage with technology once it’s been totally de-risked, they lose their seat at the table. Products are developed without them. Workflows are designed around different assumptions. And then we spend years trying to retrofit tools that were never created with community-based care in mind.

As Drew Mullane from WCJS put it, uncertainty is already part of the job. CBOs navigate it every day by investing in training, implementing new models and adapting to constant change.

Partnering with early-stage companies requires a leap of faith. And in 2026, it’s one leaders can and need to shape in ways that reenergize how care is delivered if CBOs want to stay relevant and competitive.

Keys to Effective Partnerships

The strongest partnerships are built on honesty. That’s what stuck with me from these sessions at NatCon the most. The most innovative thing each of these four pairs did was to decide to be honest with each other.

Honest about what isn’t working
Honest about what technology can’t do
Honest about real-world constraints

Strong, honest partnerships are crucial to any organization’s success. This is what allowed Behavioral Health Tech and the National Council to create this panel together. If you’re a CBO or a tech startup, these opportunities are right in front of you. They become real when both sides come to the table sooner and are willing to meet in the messy middle.

CBOs and startups alike should remember that the discomfort you feel at the beginning of a true collaboration is a sign you’re doing it right. It’s a signal that you’re uncovering what it really takes to make an impact for the populations you serve.

We’re continuing the conversation with the National Council at the 2026 Behavioral Health Tech Conference in September 22-24^th, 2026 and NatCon in April 2027, along with leading CBOs and tech innovators who have been there, Medicaid MCOs, funders and more. Join us, and join the leading edge of behavioral health and technology partnerships.