Mental health text service lands contract with UnitedHealthcare, Optum
The partnership will spread Cope Notes to thousands of Medicaid recipients in major Florida markets.
It took eight years of late night copy writing and researching, psychological studies and lots of trial and error, but Johnny Crowder’s Cope Notes has finally gotten its big break, he says.
The Tampa-based healthtech firm delivers daily mental health support to its users through SMS text messages — a model Crowder and his team of seven employees have bootstrapped since Cope Notes’ founding in 2018. Now, the company has entered into its first long-term insurance contract, with industry giants UnitedHealthcare and Optum, spreading Cope Notes to thousands of Medicaid recipients across Florida, Crowder says.
Cope Notes’ agreement with the insurance company is a five-year expansion signed after the conclusion of a successful one year pilot, Crowder says. Optum and UnitedHealthcare have begun offering Cope Notes to Medicaid recipients at two pivotal points of care, according to a release: as an additional support for members who agree to receive hands-on mental health assistance and as an alternative for families who declined to participate in traditional methods of mental health wraparound services and support.
Both Crowder and UnitedHealthcare declined to disclose financial terms of the agreement.
“My original idea was that I was going to help individual people like me who might need some additional support, but now I’m seeing our partnerships reach way more people than we ever thought was capable,” Crowder says. “We’ve become really partnership focused, working with governments, public school districts, community health programs — whoever can help us take two plus two and turn it into a million by combining resources.”