Most digital health companies of the last decade chased the easiest patients - mild anxiety, mild depression, a therapist over video. Amae Health went the other direction, toward the patients the system most often loses.
Amae Health is a Los Angeles-based, psychiatry-led healthcare company that treats severe mental illness (SMI) - a category that includes schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, borderline personality disorder and treatment-resistant depression. These are conditions that touch a small share of the population but account for an outsized share of hospitalizations, incarceration and early death.
The company's premise is deceptively simple: build a real clinic. Not a virtual-only app, but a physical place where a person with a serious diagnosis can see a psychiatrist, a therapist, a primary care provider, a dietitian, a peer mentor and a care coordinator - all on one coordinated team, in one building, working from one shared record.
That integration is the product. In conventional care, a patient with schizophrenia might see a psychiatrist who never speaks to their primary care doctor, a therapist who never sees their labs, and a caseworker who learns about a hospitalization weeks after the fact. Amae's model collapses those silos into a single care team designed around the patient rather than the billing code.
Founded in January 2022, the company opened its first clinic in Los Angeles that year and has since expanded to locations across California, New York and North Carolina. It is incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation, a structure that legally binds its mission to its business.
The ambition is stated plainly and, for the field, unusually: to move severe mental illness from something you manage for life toward something closer to a cure. It is a big claim. Amae's answer is to publish the numbers.
