Reimagining Mental Healthcare: We Need a New Road, Not a Bigger Truck
A practitioner perspective by Dr. Jenna Glover, Licensed Psychologist and Chief Clinical Officer, Headspace.
The argument
Scaling today's broken mental health model will not fix the access crisis. The system needs redesign that pairs AI-driven digital tools with human clinicians and ensures solutions are genuinely accessible to underserved communities.
Why we picked it
The HTC editorial desk curates practitioner perspectives that pass a simple test: would a health system executive, product leader, or investor act differently after reading it? This piece by Dr. Jenna Glover earns its place - it comes from the operating trenches of mental health tech, not the conference stage, and it takes a position specific enough to disagree with.
The bigger picture
The AI adoption question runs through every executive conversation in 2026. The evidence base is finally arriving: the largest controlled study of ambient documentation, published in JAMA, found clinicians saved 16 minutes of documentation time per day - but only a third of users hit the usage threshold for maximum benefit (our coverage). Meanwhile Rock Health has stopped labeling AI as a differentiator at all, because every company claims it - which is exactly why operating discipline of the kind described here separates winners from demo-ware.
Read it alongside our own reporting in Mental Health Tech, where the data behind this debate is covered daily on the HTC Wire.