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What exactly is the concern here by Headway? Are they afraid AI deep fakes will be receiving therapy? Obviously they are doing data collection and selling trai

What exactly is the concern here by Headway? Are they afraid AI deep fakes will be receiving therapy? Obviously they are doing data collection and selling training data of emotional conversations to AI labs. But what's their stated justification? I can't figure it out.

germinalphrase 4mo ago
insurance compliance?
- banannaeugene 4mo ago
  [dead]
smelendez 4mo ago
Probably medication fraud. They mention heightened scrutiny around controlled substances (with amphetamines for ADHD as an example) on the FAQ. https://help.headway.co/hc/en-us/articles/29673299878676-Documenting-controlled-substances-prescriptions-during-session-confirmation#h_01J67J9KV1ABXECBE2FYRGA5AC https://help.headway.co/hc/en-us/articles/29673299878676-Doc... The risk is that a drug dealer or addict pays people to use their identities and possibly insurance info, pretends to be them and to have ADHD in telehealth sessions, and stockpiles Adderall.
- kotaKat 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - sonofhans 4mo ago
    Government-issued IDs work and human verification of them is largely successful. This is not about correct verification, it’s about cheap machine-based verification. The dehumanization of it is part of how they plan to make money. So yes verification is needed. We can do that just fine without more facial recognition intruding into everyday affairs.
    - kotaKat 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
        > Viagra, Ozempic and ketamine, legal meth You sound condescending but each of those substances is currently positively life changing to MILLIONS of people every day. Viagra can give you your sex life back, ozempic can give you a healthy body again and ketamin and legal meth can return you to being a functional and happy human.
        skeeter2020 4mo ago
        and each of these substances is widely mis-prescribed, abused and has huge illegal markets. Just because the OP obviously referred to this scenario doesn't mean they discounted your interpretation of big pharma. Also since you want to promote a super narrow perspective, Ozempic is a type-2 diabetes drug that has pivoted to the more lucrative weight-lose market and Viagra a pretty ho-hum hypertension drug that makes a better boner pill, so your takes are technically "side-effects"
    - smelendez 4mo ago
      I was trying to think what the least intrusive option here would be. You need to verify that the patient has ID matching their name and face, which could be done offline by a notary or other trusted party if a patient prefers. But you also need to confirm the person showing up for the online sessions is actually the verified patient, and I'm not sure how you do that to maximize privacy. I guess you could take a photo at the in-person verification, have the medical provider sign off that it's the same person as their patient, and then destroy the photo?
      - sonofhans 4mo ago
        Right, it’s a hairball. And all to enable a remote-first, VC-backed business model. Most people would rather see doctors in person.
  - jdgoesmarching 4mo ago
    Every user of Headway is required to submit to this, regardless of medication status, or they lose access to the platform (and their therapist). HN has come a long way if we’re considering it a nothing burger that sending scans of your face to a 3rd party verification company is required to not lose access to your healthcare provider.
    - wat10000 4mo ago
      HN is filled with the most ridiculous nonsense, hence my username.
    - chrisweekly 4mo ago
      wait - even for interactions with non-prescribers? that's even less defensible!
      - banannaeugene 4mo ago
        [dead]
  - wat10000 4mo ago
    I've done telehealth from multiple providers and they've never required a biometric scan. If this is "of course" then why would that be?
- olyjohn 4mo ago
  How many people would you need to stack up in therapy just to get enough Adderall to sell to make money? One person is only going to be able to get a 30 day supply at a time. Most people taking it for recreation are taking much higher doses than prescribed. I don't think that a drug dealer is going to be organized enough to do hour long sessions every week for 30 different people and not get noticed.
  - smelendez 4mo ago
    The ADHD patients aren’t necessarily the ones doing weekly talk therapy. They’re meeting occasionally for a quick chat with a psychiatrist. I agree, if you’re just doing talk therapy it seems overkill. But they may have concerns about emergencies, where a patient is in crisis and you realize you don’t actually know who they are. And insurance fraud: Alice has health insurance, her friend Betty does not but needs therapy, so she signs up under Alice’s name (“oh, I actually go by Betty.”) In general, I don’t think it’s that outlandish that the company wants to know definitively who its patients are and be able to demonstrate it does, but hopefully they can come up with more options for verification.
- siva7 4mo ago
  Well, that doesn't scale to be worth the risk, and should be immidiately obvious to any dealer with an iq higher than room temperature.
mystraline 4mo ago
Some people lie about identity when getting mental health. They also direct pay cash, and no insurance. Pilots and US govt cleared people go through hell, or get their permissions revoked if you try to get mental health. So the answer is to pay out of pocket and lie. HOWEVER with Peter Thiel's invasive facial recog shit being forced means that even if you want to remain anonymous, now you cant. As for misappropriation of drugs, that can also easily happen in person. Some Thielian shit isnt going to stop that.
- FireBeyond 4mo ago
  Meanwhile, on Hims, you fill out a form prior to meeting with the physician via a text-only chat. And if you filled it out "wrong", then the physician tells you that if these were your final answers, you wouldn't meet criteria, but if you had, say, answered x instead of y for q3 and b instead of c for q5, you can get the meds. "Would you like to review your answers for a few minutes?"
  - kotaKat 4mo ago
    Yup, 'cause if the noctor prescribes the script, only then does the noctor gets their paycheck.
dccooper 4mo ago
Oh dang - I actually know the answer here. TL:DR - Regulations are changing / unclear around prescribing medications online and this is them trying to get ahead of it. Headway’s new facial-scan requirement is probably less about one company getting weird with biometrics and more about where telehealth regulation is heading: with COVID-era prescribing flexibilities, companies like Done abused controlled substance prescribing to the point that the DEA is now signaling that they will demand stronger identity proofing for controlled-substance prescribing. But the implementation matters. Could you do all this through other means? Definitely. Would it scale as easily / get in Peter Thiel and VC's good graces by using their tool? Who knows. All to say this is probably more about changing regulations in how care is provided online - and more companies should be expected to follow suit when it comes to prescribing controlled substances.
- zdragnar 4mo ago
  Surely this would affect all online prescribers and third party certification companies, who have been using government ID card verification for years. I don't think biometric data is necessary at all here.
- skeeter2020 4mo ago
  What seems more likely for a startup doing online mental health to collect biometric data? 1. "getting ahead" of potentially changing regulations. 2. collecting data they don't need because it's (a) easier and (b) never know when you'll need it!
- mapt 4mo ago
  If it turns out that all recordings of your therapy sessions are being absorbed by Palantir and then get leaked to the darkweb, do we execute this CEO on livestream by boat torture, or do they offer you a link good for six months of free identity theft monitoring, and a free session to talk about feelings of violation and loss of your privacy? The thing you need in therapy is a degree of trust. I'm not sure I would have sufficient trust even if we stipulated the boat torture.
- 3vo-ai 4mo ago
  [flagged]
cortesoft 4mo ago
Could be insurance or prescription drug related. Need to make sure the person getting care is a real person and who they say they are?
- zdragnar 4mo ago
  This has been a solved problem for some time now. There are already third party solutions for this based around verifying government issued ID cards and therapist attestation of who they visited with in their notes. Biometric data isn't needed at all.

germinalphrase 4mo ago

insurance compliance?

banannaeugene 4mo ago
[dead]

smelendez 4mo ago

Probably medication fraud. They mention heightened scrutiny around controlled substances (with amphetamines for ADHD as an example) on the FAQ. https://help.headway.co/hc/en-us/articles/29673299878676-Documenting-controlled-substances-prescriptions-during-session-confirmation#h_01J67J9KV1ABXECBE2FYRGA5AC https://help.headway.co/hc/en-us/articles/29673299878676-Doc... The risk is that a drug dealer or addict pays people to use their identities and possibly insurance info, pretends to be them and to have ADHD in telehealth sessions, and stockpiles Adderall.

kotaKat 4mo ago
[flagged]
- sonofhans 4mo ago
  Government-issued IDs work and human verification of them is largely successful. This is not about correct verification, it’s about cheap machine-based verification. The dehumanization of it is part of how they plan to make money. So yes verification is needed. We can do that just fine without more facial recognition intruding into everyday affairs.
  - kotaKat 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
      > Viagra, Ozempic and ketamine, legal meth You sound condescending but each of those substances is currently positively life changing to MILLIONS of people every day. Viagra can give you your sex life back, ozempic can give you a healthy body again and ketamin and legal meth can return you to being a functional and happy human.
      - skeeter2020 4mo ago
        and each of these substances is widely mis-prescribed, abused and has huge illegal markets. Just because the OP obviously referred to this scenario doesn't mean they discounted your interpretation of big pharma. Also since you want to promote a super narrow perspective, Ozempic is a type-2 diabetes drug that has pivoted to the more lucrative weight-lose market and Viagra a pretty ho-hum hypertension drug that makes a better boner pill, so your takes are technically "side-effects"
  - smelendez 4mo ago
    I was trying to think what the least intrusive option here would be. You need to verify that the patient has ID matching their name and face, which could be done offline by a notary or other trusted party if a patient prefers. But you also need to confirm the person showing up for the online sessions is actually the verified patient, and I'm not sure how you do that to maximize privacy. I guess you could take a photo at the in-person verification, have the medical provider sign off that it's the same person as their patient, and then destroy the photo?
    - sonofhans 4mo ago
      Right, it’s a hairball. And all to enable a remote-first, VC-backed business model. Most people would rather see doctors in person.
- jdgoesmarching 4mo ago
  Every user of Headway is required to submit to this, regardless of medication status, or they lose access to the platform (and their therapist). HN has come a long way if we’re considering it a nothing burger that sending scans of your face to a 3rd party verification company is required to not lose access to your healthcare provider.
  - wat10000 4mo ago
    HN is filled with the most ridiculous nonsense, hence my username.
  - chrisweekly 4mo ago
    wait - even for interactions with non-prescribers? that's even less defensible!
    - banannaeugene 4mo ago
      [dead]
- wat10000 4mo ago
  I've done telehealth from multiple providers and they've never required a biometric scan. If this is "of course" then why would that be?
olyjohn 4mo ago
How many people would you need to stack up in therapy just to get enough Adderall to sell to make money? One person is only going to be able to get a 30 day supply at a time. Most people taking it for recreation are taking much higher doses than prescribed. I don't think that a drug dealer is going to be organized enough to do hour long sessions every week for 30 different people and not get noticed.
- smelendez 4mo ago
  The ADHD patients aren’t necessarily the ones doing weekly talk therapy. They’re meeting occasionally for a quick chat with a psychiatrist. I agree, if you’re just doing talk therapy it seems overkill. But they may have concerns about emergencies, where a patient is in crisis and you realize you don’t actually know who they are. And insurance fraud: Alice has health insurance, her friend Betty does not but needs therapy, so she signs up under Alice’s name (“oh, I actually go by Betty.”) In general, I don’t think it’s that outlandish that the company wants to know definitively who its patients are and be able to demonstrate it does, but hopefully they can come up with more options for verification.
siva7 4mo ago
Well, that doesn't scale to be worth the risk, and should be immidiately obvious to any dealer with an iq higher than room temperature.

mystraline 4mo ago

Some people lie about identity when getting mental health. They also direct pay cash, and no insurance. Pilots and US govt cleared people go through hell, or get their permissions revoked if you try to get mental health. So the answer is to pay out of pocket and lie. HOWEVER with Peter Thiel's invasive facial recog shit being forced means that even if you want to remain anonymous, now you cant. As for misappropriation of drugs, that can also easily happen in person. Some Thielian shit isnt going to stop that.

FireBeyond 4mo ago
Meanwhile, on Hims, you fill out a form prior to meeting with the physician via a text-only chat. And if you filled it out "wrong", then the physician tells you that if these were your final answers, you wouldn't meet criteria, but if you had, say, answered x instead of y for q3 and b instead of c for q5, you can get the meds. "Would you like to review your answers for a few minutes?"
- kotaKat 4mo ago
  Yup, 'cause if the noctor prescribes the script, only then does the noctor gets their paycheck.

dccooper 4mo ago

Oh dang - I actually know the answer here. TL:DR - Regulations are changing / unclear around prescribing medications online and this is them trying to get ahead of it. Headway’s new facial-scan requirement is probably less about one company getting weird with biometrics and more about where telehealth regulation is heading: with COVID-era prescribing flexibilities, companies like Done abused controlled substance prescribing to the point that the DEA is now signaling that they will demand stronger identity proofing for controlled-substance prescribing. But the implementation matters. Could you do all this through other means? Definitely. Would it scale as easily / get in Peter Thiel and VC's good graces by using their tool? Who knows. All to say this is probably more about changing regulations in how care is provided online - and more companies should be expected to follow suit when it comes to prescribing controlled substances.

zdragnar 4mo ago
Surely this would affect all online prescribers and third party certification companies, who have been using government ID card verification for years. I don't think biometric data is necessary at all here.
skeeter2020 4mo ago
What seems more likely for a startup doing online mental health to collect biometric data? 1. "getting ahead" of potentially changing regulations. 2. collecting data they don't need because it's (a) easier and (b) never know when you'll need it!
mapt 4mo ago
If it turns out that all recordings of your therapy sessions are being absorbed by Palantir and then get leaked to the darkweb, do we execute this CEO on livestream by boat torture, or do they offer you a link good for six months of free identity theft monitoring, and a free session to talk about feelings of violation and loss of your privacy? The thing you need in therapy is a degree of trust. I'm not sure I would have sufficient trust even if we stipulated the boat torture.
3vo-ai 4mo ago
[flagged]

cortesoft 4mo ago

Could be insurance or prescription drug related. Need to make sure the person getting care is a real person and who they say they are?

zdragnar 4mo ago
This has been a solved problem for some time now. There are already third party solutions for this based around verifying government issued ID cards and therapist attestation of who they visited with in their notes. Biometric data isn't needed at all.