Taking Specialist Anxiety and OCD Care Off the Waitlist with Mona Potter, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Strategy Officer of InStride Health
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In this episode of Tech Can’t Save Us, Paul speaks to Mona Potter, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Strategy Officer of InStride Health, about why evidence-based anxiety and OCD care so rarely reaches the families who need it, and how InStride closes that gap.
This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Mona Potter, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Strategy Officer of InStride Health, an insurance-based virtual provider of specialty anxiety and OCD treatment for young people aged 7 to 26. Founded by two Harvard-trained clinicians who spent over a decade building intensive anxiety programmes at McLean Hospital, InStride delivers a purposefully time-bound course of care, typically four to eight months, through a dedicated three-person team of therapist, exposure coach and psychiatrist.
They discuss why treatment with decades of evidence behind it still fails to reach most families, blocked by long waitlists, a shortage of specialists and geography rather than by any gap in the science. Mona explains the InStride model: cognitive behavioural therapy with exposure at its centre, delivered virtually so that practice happens in the places where anxiety actually shows up, at school, in a restaurant, at home, rather than in a clinician’s office. She points to the outcomes InStride publishes every year, including 97% of graduates showing clinical improvement and fewer than 1% being hospitalised in the year after finishing the programme.
The conversation covers what it takes to scale specialty care without thinning it out: going in network with major commercial insurers, expanding state by state, and using technology, including AI trained on InStride’s own clinical data, to support care teams while every clinical decision stays with a clinician. Mona also shares what nearly two decades inside the Mass General, McLean and Harvard Medical School system taught her about the distance between care that works and care families can actually get, and why she left to build something that closes it.
Find more about InStride Health here: https://www.instride.health/
Follow Mona Potter, MD here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-potter-md-28ba2179/