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Imagine gathering the courage for weeks or even months to seek mental health support, only to find yourself opening up to a provider who doesn’t truly understand your experiences.
Or picture an employee, already navigating severe depression while working full-time, spending hours to find a provider, then waiting weeks for an appointment—only to discover they’ll have to start the exhausting search all over because the fit isn’t right.
Unfortunately, these stories are all too common in mental healthcare today. While access remains a significant barrier, an equally pressing issue is ensuring people connect with the right provider.
As someone who has spent decades dedicated to quality mental healthcare—first in the military and now as the Chief Medical Officer at Spring Health—I’ve seen how the right provider-patient match can be the difference between successful treatment and someone giving up on care entirely.
Trial-and-error is the current approach
Even when employees have mental health coverage through their health plans, many with care needs either never receive care or drop out early. This isn't just a personal issue—it has broader impacts.
In the current system, treatment often reflects what a provider specializes in rather than what a person genuinely needs. With limited access and long wait times, people are left with a trial-and-error approach, settling for any available provider instead of the right one with the right skills for their care.
This discouraging experience can lead people to abandon their search for help entirely, convinced that quality care and a good fit are simply out of reach.
Addressing the access issue is essential, especially when considering provider-patient fit. Quick access matters because many will give up before even beginning care. And for fit to truly work, each patient needs fast access to a broad pool of providers to find the right match.
Why provider-patient fit matters
Even after taking the courageous first step into mental health care, many patients struggle to build a solid therapeutic alliance and drop out after just 1–2 sessions.
When the right provider-patient fit is found, a strong alliance can form quickly, allowing the patient to receive the most effective type of treatment and increasing the chances of a positive outcome. While quick access to care is essential, it’s only the first step—keeping patients engaged through meaningful provider relationships is key to treatment success.
The therapeutic alliance—the relationship between client and provider—drives 45-50% of clinical outcomes, often having more impact than the specific type of therapy itself. This alliance depends on three core elements:
- A strong personal connection between provider and patient
- A shared understanding of the conditions and issues to address
- A shared agreement on the treatment approach
So, let’s talk about the two most important aspects of a good fit.
Member preference is only one piece of a good fit
Member preferences regarding their provider play a significant role in helping people take that courageous first step toward addressing their mental health challenges.
When patients connect with providers who share relevant life experiences—like military service, cultural background, LGBTQ+ identity, or other important factors—they have a common language and understanding that fosters trust and builds a stronger alliance faster.
For example, during my military career, I observed that some civilian providers without a military background often struggled to quickly establish trust with some soldiers, as they lacked familiarity with military-specific language, customs, work environment, and family life.
Without these shared experiences and language, building therapeutic alliances can take longer and sometimes prove less effective. In contrast, service members connected more readily with providers who shared their backgrounds and experiences, creating noticeable differences in rapport and understanding.
This resonance between provider and patient helps individuals feel heard and understood from the first session. When this connection exists, providers can more effectively support patients within the context of their world and experiences. Without it, forming a strong therapeutic alliance can take longer, potentially delaying progress or leading to early dropout.
But there’s another crucial part of this puzzle. Alongside member preferences, clinical matching is also essential to create the most effective fit.
Clinical matching goes deeper than preferences
Many mental health solutions claim to offer provider-patient matching but often focus only on patient preferences. While preferences are important, clinical matching is also essential. For instance, if a patient with PTSD connects with a preferred provider who isn’t skilled in treating PTSD, their chance of improvement is limited. The most effective matching combines patient preferences with finding a provider with the right clinical expertise.
Not all clinical matching is created equal. Some solutions that claim to offer “clinical” matching rely on traditional indicators like training type, years of experience, or listed therapy skills. Unfortunately, research shows these factors don’t strongly correlate with better outcomes.
Optimal clinical matching requires two things:
- Comprehensive clinical screening to thoroughly understand a patient’s needs
- Reliable insight into each provider’s strengths in treating specific conditions
With these two pieces, we can integrate smart clinical recommendations into our patient-provider matching process.
Accurately assessing provider skills requires a different approach. A solution must include the routine use of measurement-based care (MBC) to track patient outcomes. This then allows a program to see the actual outcomes a provider can produce and starts to show which types of cases a provider is best able to treat.
At Spring Health, we embed MBC into all care delivery to track and adapt to patient needs, ensuring continuous improvement and insight into each provider’s strengths. Our electronic health record, Compass, is used by 100% of our providers, enabling us to accurately track the performance of our network providers. This means every member benefits from our ideal matching process across all providers, not just those providers who might happen to use a solution’s internal tools.
A comprehensive approach to matching
Every member on our platform begins their care journey with a clinically validated screening that assesses mental health symptoms, pinpointing specific challenges or "hotspots" across more than 10 conditions, including anxiety, depression, trauma, and others. This initial clinical screening is the cornerstone of our matching process, ensuring:
- A deep understanding of the likely clinical conditions a patient may face
- Ensuring a strong baseline for the use of measurement-based care throughout treatment by every provider in our network
Our technology infrastructure is designed to collect and analyze our care data allowing us to continuously improve our matching algorithm as new data is gathered.
This baseline screening process allows us to identify a member’s unique mental health challenges and match them with providers who successfully treat those conditions while honoring member preferences.
A matching process that works
The more we understand a member's clinical needs before matching, the better we can align their preferences and clinical requirements with the right provider.
Among our members, our matching algorithm has significantly improved care delivery by leading to:
- Higher initial appointment booking rates
- Faster access to care
- Fewer dropouts from care, especially in the early stages
- Continually better overall outcomes our matching models learn and adapt
The financial case for better matching
Effective matching reduces the friction of patients dropping out and restarting care—or abandoning treatment altogether—saving both time and money.
For organizations, effective provider matching offers multiple benefits:
- Lower cost per successful outcome
- Reduced absenteeism
- Improved employee performance and leadership
- Better employee retention rates
- Higher ROI on mental health benefits
- Proven total healthcare spend savings
Looking forward: fit is the future of mental healthcare
As we move beyond basic access challenges in mental healthcare, focusing on provider-patient fit marks the next frontier in effective treatment. This approach benefits everyone: patients receive more impactful care, providers work with individuals they’re best equipped to support, and organizations see improved outcomes and ROI.
This is an exciting shift for the mental health industry, as it enhances patient outcomes and boosts providers' professional satisfaction by aligning them with those they’re best suited to help.
The future of mental healthcare lies in addressing access issues while ensuring every therapeutic relationship has the strongest possible foundation for success.
Explore how accessible, affordable behavioral healthcare is becoming a reality and challenging the old limits of the industry.
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