In our fifth and final episode of Season 2, our host Chris LaVictoire Mahai sits down with Octave’s Golee Abrishami, PhD, VP of Clinical Care, and Tony Glebe, Head of Business Development, to dig into the vast and often misunderstood topic of mental and behavioral health. Discussing a subject close to home for many yet only more recently thrust into the spotlight, Chris, Golee, and Tony explore the experiences of consumers/patients, clinicians, and healthcare organizations all trying to navigate this rapidly evolving space.

From access concerns to service delivery, to the role of the payer, this episode takes a deeper look at what it means to keep mental and behavioral health at the forefront of our conversations and healthcare transformation.

New this season! Each episode features consumer voices and testimonials based on their experiences, allowing us to truly orient our conversations from the “outside-in.” Thank you to those who shared their experiences with us.

About our guests

Golee Abrishami, PhD, is the VP of Clinical Care at Octave, where she leads the development and implementation of evidence-based, high-quality mental health care. She is a clinical psychologist and experienced mental healthcare leader with over a decade of experience in management. Prior to joining Octave, Golee was Director of Psychiatry at Kaiser Permanente, managing a large multidisciplinary behavioral health department. She also was a Regional Director for Center For Discovery, where she oversaw the expansion of the company to new markets nationwide. 

Tony Glebe is the Head of Business Development at Octave, where he is responsible for guiding the company’s growth strategy and for building relationships with payers, providers and enterprise partners to enable that strategy. He is a seasoned business development and strategy executive with over 20 years of experience helping healthcare companies create new solutions, and build high growth businesses. Over his career, Tony has held a variety of positions with healthcare organizations ranging in size from pre-revenue start-up to Fortune 50, in addition to founding and leading a boutique healthcare strategy consultancy. His former employers and clients include Cigna, AmericanWell, Definity Health, HealthEquity, Truven Health Analytics and Medecision.

About Octave

Octave is a modern behavioral health practice creating a new standard for care delivery that’s both high-quality and accessible to more people. With in-person and virtual clinics in California, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Washington D.C., the company offers personalized care plans that can include individual, couples, family and group therapy, while pioneering relationships with payers to make care more affordable through insurance. Grounded in science, Octave enables clients to experience profound change that is as measurable as it is meaningful. Learn more at www.findoctave.com 

Memorable quotes from this episode:

“I think mental healthcare is often delivered as part of the medical care delivery system. And it is under one big umbrella of wellness. But their needs are really different, and the way that the care is delivered is very different.”

Golee Abrishami, PhD

“When it comes to business decisions about how to create a program, how to do customer service, all of those things, I think it’s often lost that the emotional state of the person that we’re all working to serve in the end is such that a different approach is required entirely.”

Tony Glebe

“There’s still this big access issue. […] As more people try to pour into a system that’s already limited, we might be faced with even bigger challenges to help the people who are trying to advocate for themselves and maybe get better before they get to an acute situation.”

Golee Abrishami, PhD

“What you find in many markets across the US is really a bifurcated healthcare system. […] For payers to begin finding ways to compensate therapists in ways that are more equivalent to cash pay rates, actually pulls more people into the system and then opens up access to people that otherwise might not be able to afford it. By changing reimbursement policies and approaches, payers can make a shift in the market.”

Tony Glebe