The behavioral health tech sector is growing at a remarkable pace, yet it is still very much in its formative stages. As innovation surges forward, the industry faces a critical challenge: defining its own boundaries. Without established norms, standards, and agreed-upon metrics, behavioral health tech risks moving quickly without a cohesive structure to ensure safety, effectiveness, and ethical alignment.
At the HLTH conference, Dr. Yusra Benhalim, senior national medical director at Optum, addressed this tension directly. “I think innovation is great,” she said. “I think we’re getting swept away, which is exciting. But we’re missing a collective agreement to hold ourselves accountable to make sure that this is happening in a safe way.”
This observation underscores a central reality: while technological innovation offers incredible promise, behavioral health tech must balance speed with responsibility.
The Difficulty of Standardization in Behavioral Health
Creating industry-wide norms for behavioral health tech is no easy task. Behavioral health has long struggled with the absence of widely recognized standards for care delivery, process measures, and outcome assessments. Establishing standards is essential, particularly as the sector moves toward value-based care models, which depend on standardized outcomes to evaluate success.
Even traditional behavioral health faces fragmented systems, limited data, and inconsistent measurement tools. Introducing technology adds another layer of complexity, especially when tech companies bring a disruption-focused mindset that often clashes with clinical practices.
COVID-19 accelerated these dynamics in two major ways. First, it revealed the potential of telehealth and other digital tools to deliver behavioral health care remotely. Second, it sparked an influx of venture capital into the behavioral health tech space. While funding growth has slowed over the past year, the groundwork for a technology-driven transformation of the sector has already been laid.
Ethical Tensions and Sector Differences
One of the most pressing challenges in behavioral health tech is navigating the ethical differences between the tech and healthcare sectors. Tech often prioritizes speed, scale, and disruption, whereas behavioral health emphasizes safety, evidence-based care, and ethical responsibility.
A 2021 Deloitte report highlighted that behavioral health continues to face gaps in scientific knowledge, sub-scale systems, and systemic isolation from the broader healthcare ecosystem. These factors amplify the need for careful integration of technology to ensure it complements, rather than compromises, patient care.
Nonclinical Roles and Expanding Access
Panelists at HLTH emphasized that nonclinical staff, such as peer support specialists and behavioral coaches, could play a critical role in addressing workforce shortages. Organizations like Aetna and Cigna are already incorporating these roles into their care strategies, expanding access while alleviating pressure on licensed clinicians.
Benhalim cautioned against the imprecise use of terminology in this evolving landscape. “The behavioral health space has become a sort of Wild West,” she said. “We have to be intentional about defining the words that we’re using. A coach can mean lots of different things. As an industry, I think, we want to learn together but we want to make sure that we’re doing it in a very safe way.”
Varun Choudhary, chief medical officer of Talkspace, elaborated on the potential of nonclinical staff to guide patients through care systems. At Talkspace, licensed clinicians provide therapy, while asynchronous messaging tools—text, audio, and video—allow patients to communicate with their providers efficiently. This hybrid approach increases patient access and extends the reach of therapists without compromising the therapeutic alliance.
The Irreplaceable Human Touch
Despite the rise of AI, chatbots, and automated mental health tools, experts agree that behavioral health tech cannot replace the human touch of a licensed clinician. Choudhary emphasized that the therapeutic alliance formed between patient and therapist remains central to effective treatment.
“There is no replacing licensed therapists … That human touch, that therapeutic alliance that you get from a licensed clinician — I’m not sure you can get that from a chatbot,” he said.
Dr. David Stark, chief medical officer at Morgan Stanley, suggested that behavioral health tech may have its most immediate impact on administrative and operational tasks. These include patient intake, triage, symptom tracking, standardized assessments, patient-provider matching, and remote monitoring. In essence, technology can replace the “clipboard” and reduce the burden of manual processes, allowing clinicians to focus on direct patient care.
Leveraging Data and AI: Opportunities and Challenges
AI, machine learning, and remote monitoring tools in behavioral health tech offer the potential to shift care from reactive to proactive. Stark highlighted the power of “nudges”—personalized messages sent to patients to remind them of self-care practices. Similarly, Krishnan noted that social media mining and digital data could provide novel measures of behavioral health outcomes, allowing for more nuanced risk assessments and progress tracking.
Yet, with these capabilities come serious privacy concerns. The collection of personal data, remote monitoring, and AI-driven insights must be carefully regulated to avoid crossing ethical boundaries. Krishnan raised the critical question: “Where do you have to draw the line and say, ‘This is an invasion of privacy; this is not net beneficial, etc.’”
Choudhary stressed that the lack of standardized outcome measures remains a central barrier to responsibly using behavioral health tech. “We are at least five to 10 years behind medicine in how we conceptualize these measures and how we utilize them for value-based care,” he said.
Bridging the Gap Between Innovation and Clinical Reality
Behavioral health tech is constrained by the challenges of the sector itself—limited data, inconsistent outcomes, and small-scale systems. Yet, these constraints also present an opportunity for creativity and innovation. Benhalim emphasized the need to explore new metrics while keeping patient experience at the center:
“This is a time for us to be inspired, to be really creative, to say [that] we may not know what the metrics should be but start to put some new ones out there. Let’s test and learn together. And let’s start to infuse more of that human experience, which is hard to measure, but is possible.”
The Path Forward
Behavioral health tech stands at a pivotal moment. Its potential to expand access, improve efficiency, and enhance patient outcomes is enormous, but growth must be guided by collaboration, ethical clarity, and standardized practices. Stakeholders agree that the industry must coalesce around shared norms, clearly define the roles of nonclinical staff, protect patient privacy, and preserve the human touch that is central to effective therapy.
Ultimately, the success of behavioral health tech will be measured not by the speed of innovation or the sophistication of AI algorithms, but by its ability to meet patient needs safely and effectively. By focusing on patient-centered solutions, fostering interindustry collaboration, and thoughtfully integrating technology, the sector can move from a Wild West of experimentation to a structured, sustainable, and transformative force in healthcare.
