David Ebersman, longtime tech executive who took Facebook public as its CFO, has launched a new startup to focus on helping people with mental illness and substance abuse.
Ebersman, with a team of health care experts and data scientists, unveiled on Thursday Lyra Health, saying the company has the ambitious goal of transforming behavioral health care using technology. Too many patients suffering depression, anxiety or drug addiction — all of which are rampant in the high-stakes, fast-paced Silicon Valley — never get proper treatment.
The vast majority of patients are undiagnosed, untreated or treated with ineffective therapies, Ebersman said in a written statement.
The Burlingame-based startup says it uses analytics technology to identify people at risk of substance abuse or mental illness; software to match patients with the right providers and treatments; big data to assess treatment outcomes and understand what works; and software on the provider end to help doctors and therapists diagnose patients.
Ignoring (patients ) needs ultimately costs health plans, self-insured enterprises and our health care system billions of dollars every year, said Dr. Dena Bravata, Lyra Health co-founder. It s both a moral and economic imperative that we fix this problem.
Approximately 50 million Americans suffer from behavioral health conditions, which include everything from alcohol dependency to PTSD and schizophrenia; the U.S. spends about $100 billion annually to treat these conditions. Lyra Health says it will work with employers, health plans and health care providers to deploy its technology.
Ebersman was CFO at Genentech from 1994 to 2009, and later held the same position at Facebook, where he stepped down in 2014.
Photo: David Ebersman, then Facebook s chief financial officer, in 2011. (Kirstina Sangsahachart/Daily News)
