Tech-Enabled Care: Why Clinicians Must Remain at the Center of Digital Behavioral Health
A practitioner perspective by Shannon Werb, CEO, Array Behavioral Care.
The argument
The post-pandemic flood of point solutions fragmented behavioral health care instead of improving it. The industry should build unified platforms that give clinicians complete patient data and integrated workflows, with technology supporting rather than substituting for clinical judgment.
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 Shannon Werb 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.