From Practice to Innovation: Conversations with Mental Health Tech Leaders
An interview with Michael Arevalo, Psy.D., PMP, Clinical Product Lead at Headway
The integration of technology into mental health care has ushered in a new era of innovation and accessibility. From mobile apps offering mindfulness exercises to virtual therapy platforms connecting individuals with licensed professionals, the landscape of mental health tech is rapidly evolving to meet the diverse needs of users.
The rise of mental health tech companies has allowed licensed clinicians to move from the clinical setting to corporate leadership. In this monthly post, we will chat with professionals from the mental health tech industry to learn more about them, their current job, and the path they took to get where they are now.
Michael Arevalo, Psy.D., PMP is the Clinical Product Lead at Headway and a seasoned consultant and mentor in the digital health tech industry. With a background in clinical psychology and a diverse range of specializations, he has uniquely positioned himself at the intersection of mental health and technology. Through his work, he exemplifies how integrating subject matter knowledge with industry experience can transform the landscape of digital health, driving innovation, and shaping the future of provider-focused products.
Lindy: Let’s start with Therapists in Tech. What made you decide to get involved with them?
Mike: I heard about Therapists in Tech back in 2019–2020, when I was making the transition from clinical into health tech. I started talking to a couple of people on Linkedin. I just saw the work that they were doing, everything they’re doing in tech, and did a lot of informational interviews. Actually, Ash Golden referred me and I’m very appreciative. I had an informational call with her and she said, “Hey, you should look up TnT and get involved. It’s a great organization for a lot of clinicians trying to get into the tech space.” That’s how I got connected.
And you are really involved with the mentorship program with TnT right?
Yes, that’s right. When I first joined, I really enjoyed the community. I continued informational interviews with folks and everyone was very welcoming. I wanted to give back, especially after I had made the leap into industry and landed my first role. So I spoke with Jaclyn [Satchel], who was the Interim Director of Therapist in Tech at that time, and I got involved as the brand design lead. I did a lot of work on the marketing and branding campaign for Therapists in Tech. And then there was a need for a Mentorship Committee and Jaclyn had asked me if I would like to be involved.
Can you tell me a little bit about your career path and how you got to where you are today?
I’m a clinical psychologist. I’ve worked in so many different clinical settings from college counseling to community mental health. I worked for the VA. I also worked for Kaiser back in 2019–2020. I wanted to expand my reach and have more of a large-scale positive impact. I reached out to a colleague who I worked with when I was in San Francisco. She advised me to look into consulting, and that’s when I started having some informational interviews with people on LinkedIn. I got connected with Therapists in Tech and learned some skills. I started reaching out to small startups and showcasing my value as a clinician. I got a couple of consulting jobs from just cold reach outs. Then I started working on my interview skills and jumped feet first into a digital therapeutics company.
It really shows we have all these skills as therapists and we just have to refine them to make this more what the companies are looking for.
Exactly. There’s so much throughout my career that I’ve learned, especially regarding businesses and corporate terminology. As clinicians, we’re not taught that in graduate school.
What inspired you to make the transition into industry?
It was a large part due to the pandemic. I was running an outpatient clinic in Southern California. I was seeing patient after patient and it seemed like there was no end because a lot of these patients would go through the amount of sessions that were required from the clinic and then they would come back. I felt like there just had to be more that could be done. I wanted to be able to extend my reach to help others. I believed then as I still do now, that technology can play a large role in allowing for greater access to care.
What kind of education or certifications did you get to qualify for your current role and get into industry?
Outside of getting my doctorate in psychology, I attained a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. Prior to getting that, I took the Google Coursera project management course. That did wonders for me when it came down to my interview processes. A lot of a business environment is project management, understanding agile and waterfall, project management terminologies, and methods. That’s going to be truly helpful for anyone trying to make the transition. And so I wanted to take it a step further and get PMP certified. And that has greatly helped with the operational aspects of a lot of my job.
What do you find most rewarding about your work?
Honestly just knowing the impact I’m having and the work that I’m doing. I went from working on products for patients within Digital Therapeutics and I’ve now shifted my career into working on products for providers. Finding ways to improve a provider’s workflow can help them with client work and positively impact patients. It’s knowing the impact that drives me.
And you’re with Headway, right? Can you tell me a little bit about what you do over there?
I serve as the Clinical Product Lead, and I kind of have a dual function in that it’s part product and part operations. I do work on the product side with the internal EHR, so implementing new features that can be helpful for providers in doing the work that they do with their patients. And then the operational piece can include ensuring and enhancing clinical quality within the provider network.
I see a couple of patients with Headway as a contractor but even I’m getting LinkedIn messages saying “How do we get our foot in the door with Headway to get an internal position?” They are just that popular of a company right now. What would you say to questions like that?
To reach out to myself or other people on the clinical team. We’re all very open to talking to others, and of course, we want every position to be fair and equitable. We’re more than happy to answer any questions that people may have if they’re reaching out. We definitely want to be able to hire more internal clinical team members and that should be coming up slowly throughout next year.
So you might get a lot of people messaging you.
That’s okay as long as people are okay with being a little patient with me responding to messages.
Early in my career, and in my transition, I was the one reaching out to so many people. Everyone was always so amazing to respond to me, even if it was a little bit delayed like a couple of weeks. I was so appreciative of that. I try my very best to respond even though it may take a little bit.
What advice would you give to someone who’s starting out as in a similar career path who wants to get into the mental health tech sector?
Similarly to myself, I would look into project management again, I mean, that made a whole difference for me. During my interview process, I went from not getting past the initial phone screen to getting second, third, fourth round interviews, just by taking the Google Coursera Project Management Certification.
I’d also highly suggest consulting with digital health companies. It’s hard to invest in someone that doesn’t have any industry experience because there’s such a steep learning curve. There needs to be a bridge. Being clinical and then being in industry, there was a big gap within my resume. I leaned into consulting because it was very hard for people to put all their bets on someone who doesn’t know the fast paced environment of industry. And so getting consulting jobs and reaching out to people, doing some things part time, just getting things on your resume . It’s about an industry role or working with a small scale startup that’ll definitely set you apart from others when it comes down to the interview process or even other career paths because you developed really great skills from that.
And like you’ve mentioned, that was just a cold outreach? Just reaching out to companies starting out and saying, “Hey, how can I help?”
Yes, actually, it’s called Wellfound now, but when I went on it, it was a website called Angel List. It has a list of all these early stage startups and late stage startups. I literally went to the search tab, I typed in mental health, filtered it, and then I went through every single company to see where I could add value. This company works in the sleep and sleep disorders. I specialize in sleep. Let me reach out to the CEO. This company does AI. This company serves a different clinical population that I specialize in. I’m gonna reach out to the CEO.
Wow. It’s amazing how networking can just make a difference.
Yes, exactly. It’s another skill that comes over time that gets developed. It’s not really taught when we were in graduate school trying to be clinicians.
Can you share a memorable success story or achievement from your career?
Probably very early on when I first joined Limbix. They were a digital therapeutics company for adolescent mental health and created products for adolescents. We were working on increasing meaningful engagement within our product. We want teens and tweens to come to our product and not just go through the different levels and the different modules within it, but actually get the clinical dose and the clinical pieces from it. One of the products called Spark was based on behavioral activation. We wanted to be able to teach teens to engage in the things that they may not be doing anymore because of their depressive symptoms.
We found that a lot of teens were struggling with this so we embarked on an engagement campaign to help define a new feature to help teens get more involved and become more activated. We were successfully able to do that. We had a lot of great qualitative feedback from teens saying how helpful this app is, how important it is, how it’s made a difference in their life. All across the country, teens were giving us this amazing qualitative feedback. And we also were getting quantitative feedback. We were already seeing how the numbers for engagement were increasing based on the features that we implemented, whereas before, it was dropping. Hearing the qualitative feedback from all of these teens, how important it was, and how it helped them in their life, and then even seeing how what we did had an impact quantitatively, always stands out to me.
That’s all the major questions I had. Is there anything else that you want to add?
I think going back to the question you asked me about what would be helpful for someone going on the same career path? You can also look at data analysis which is actually huge, especially for the digital health companies who are wanting you to understand their data. So something that I do a lot within my current role is making meaningful recommendations from the data. Data is data unless we can do something and make it actionable. Something that’s a big part of my role right now is seeing what the trends are and what can we do about the trends to help move in a direction that we want to. Data analysis is a big strength and skill set to develop that can be helpful too.
Especially if you get into counseling and therapy, we can get pretty rusty on our data analysis from college if we haven’t done it for years.
I definitely was there and so I had to go through a couple of refreshers, no certifications, but refreshers. I did them on the app, Data Camp.
