When Netflix first came out, it didn’t just move TV shows and movies online; it personalized the entire entertainment experience. Sure, it was still on a TV, but you no longer had to just watch whatever was on, go to the movie theatre, or rent a DVD. Viewers could now receive personalized recommendations with access to thousands of movies waiting for them to press play. And today, the more you engage, the better they understand you–entertainment tailored to individual needs.
Telehealth had a similar opportunity to change the healthcare industry with a transformative model that delivered ultra-personalized care. By removing geographical constraints and narrow provider networks, it had the potential to build teams of specialized physicians based on diagnostic insight. With the ability to treat individuals with unique, compounded needs, telehealth was poised to be a smarter, more adaptive system in which someone navigating co-occurring conditions, such as ADHD and trauma, or anxiety and autism, could work with a provider capable of providing treatment at that exact intersection.
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But unsurprisingly, that’s not what happened. What emerged was something that rewarded speed and scalability by tailoring their services to the average patient, not you. For many, telehealth has felt less like the Netflix of healthcare and more like a customer service hotline with a medical license–a reality that has been devastating for families experiencing dual diagnosis, rare conditions, and nuanced psychiatric needs.
One-Size Does Not Fit All
The rise of talk therapy apps, at first, looked like major progress for patients needing specialized care. But it quickly became apparent that these platforms weren’t built for the people who needed them most. They were built to serve the masses, prioritizing reach and revenue over patient outcomes.
For Amanda Marlar, founder of My Psych Match, this unfortunate telehealth model became a painful reality when her son started exhibiting signs of autism, and she began searching for specialists to help him. Although she was a clinician herself and quite familiar with telehealth, her experience was no match for schools that dismissed her and the specialists who wouldn’t return her calls. And even when they did call her back, they often refused to conduct the assessments needed to diagnose her son and get him the care he needed.
Eventually, her son did get a diagnosis, which changed his life. After a long road through a muddled system, Marlar finally found the right specialist who could provide a treatment plan that worked with her son, not against him. With the correct diagnosis, her son received the appropriate accommodations that he’d been missing for years. The transformation was undeniable: fewer meltdowns, better focus, and for the first time, a sense that someone understood him.
A New Telehealth Model
The experience was a catalyst for My Psych Match, a telepsychiatry platform that Marlar launched after realizing how broken the system was and that it wasn’t going to fix itself. The industry didn’t need another general talk therapy platform; it needed a company with a radically different approach: no generic intake forms, and no one-size-fits-all care.
Instead, My Psych Match builds highly specialized teams of psychiatric providers where patients are matched with psychiatrists and nurse practitioners based on their diagnostic expertise, not simply their availability. My Psych Match clinicians specialize in treatment, particularly for patients with complex or overlapping conditions like autism and trauma, ADHD and OCD, or bipolar disorder and anxiety.
This model isn’t just refreshing, it’s urgent. Current models push startups to adopt strategies that serve the general population with streamlined offerings that allow them to scale quickly and gain further investments. However, this leaves a critical population struggling to manage their conditions without proper support. According to a 2021 report by SAMHSA and a 2023 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, rates of mental health challenges have surged across all age groups, especially among those with co-occurring conditions.
Why Venture Capital Still Gets in the Way
So why did telehealth not evolve into the precision-driven system it could have been? Much of the answer lies in how the space has been funded. Venture capitalists don’t invest in mental healthcare to solve complexity—they invest to make money. Scaling, at least by traditional metrics, means finding the broadest possible audience and delivering the fastest, most repeatable service to them. In mental health, that usually translates to low-barrier talk therapy apps or generalized psychiatry platforms that prioritize availability over expertise.
As a result, many of the most prominent players in virtual mental health have uniform intake pipelines and shallow matching logic to move patients through the system quickly. That model may work for basic stress or short-term anxiety. But for patients with multiple or misdiagnosed conditions, it’s a dead end.
The irony? Research shows that doing it right works. A 2021 JAMA Psychiatry study found that patients matched with clinicians based on diagnostic expertise had significantly better outcomes than those matched more generally. In other words, precision isn’t just better for care—it’s better for business in the long run.
Telehealth’s Second Chance
Telehealth wasn’t supposed to be a digital waiting room. It was supposed to be the bridge to better care and more personal than anything that came before it. However, somewhere along the way, the industry accepted convenience as a service and called it innovation. But that didn’t solve the mental health crisis. What we needed was smarter psychiatry.
But there’s still hope. Companies like My Psych Match take a different approach built around precise diagnostic matching and a specialized network of clinicians on a similar mission. Instead of pushing patients through broad intake funnels, they are focused on fit from the beginning to help patients manage their condition truly.
By proving that precision and patient fit can coexist with scale, My Psych Match offers a blueprint for what’s next in virtual care. The next generation of telehealth won’t come from those looking to scale. It will come from those on a mission to provide meaningful solutions and put the patients first, with newfound strategies for sustainable growth in a market untapped by existing platforms.
