Our Mission: Better Outcomes Through Better Quality

Our Founding Story

Therassist was founded by David Lischner, MD, a psychiatrist who has spent over 20 years working to improve outcomes in behavioral health. David co-founded Valant, which became the leading EHR for behavioral health and was the first to automate outcome measurement—a breakthrough that helped thousands of practices track and improve their clinical results.

But David knew that measuring outcomes was only part of the solution. To truly improve quality at scale, clinicians need expert feedback on their clinical work—feedback that helps them continuously improve their skills and deliver better care.

That vision attracted Melanie Harned, PhD, lead developer of the DBT Adherence Checklist for Individual Therapy (DBT AC-I) and one of the world's leading experts in DBT adherence measurement. Melanie joined Therassist as Chief Scientific Officer, bringing decades of experience in clinical research, including developing and validating tools to assess the quality of DBT in routine practice.

Together, we share a mission: to make expert clinical feedback accessible to every therapist, so that evidence-based care becomes the standard rather than the exception.

More Than a Scribe

When we set out to build Therassist, we knew we didn't want to create just another AI scribe. Documentation is important, but it's not enough to transform the quality of care.

We wanted to build something that would help clinicians get better—session by session, skill by skill. Something that would give therapists the kind of expert feedback that traditionally required an expert supervisor to review video recordings for each session, a process so time-consuming and expensive that it was available only to a privileged few.

At the same time, we knew that organizational leaders needed tools to support their quality goals. Practice owners, clinical directors, and quality improvement leaders need visibility into adherence across their teams—not to punish clinicians, but to identify training needs, celebrate strengths, and demonstrate outcomes to payers and stakeholders.

So we built Therassist to serve both audiences: giving individual clinicians the feedback they need to improve, while giving organizations the measurement tools they need to support quality across their entire practice.

Building AI Responsibly

We believe AI has enormous potential to improve behavioral health care—but only if it's developed responsibly, with appropriate evidence-based guardrails.

That's why we've taken a rigorous, validation-first approach. Our DBT adherence scoring system was built and validated with the experts who created the instrument. We didn't just build an AI tool and hope it worked; we partnered with the creators of the DBT AC-I to ensure our approach meets the gold standard of expert-level reliability.

We're transparent about our validation process, our performance metrics, and the appropriate use cases for our tools. We clearly label beta features and communicate when tools are ready for clinical decision-making versus when they should be used only for self-observation and learning.

As the field of AI in behavioral health continues to evolve, we're committed to being a responsible leader—setting high standards for validation, transparency, and ethical use. The industry will need these guardrails, and we're building them into everything we do.

Give Payers What They Want: Proof of Quality

For too long, behavioral health has operated in a black box. You know you're delivering high-quality, evidence-based care—but you have no way to prove it to payers.

This puts you at a disadvantage. Payers spend billions on therapy services but lack objective quality data. Without it, they can't differentiate between excellent providers and mediocre ones. So they treat everyone the same, or worse, they push rates down across the board.

Therassist changes that equation.

With validated adherence measurement tools, you can demonstrate adherence to evidence-based protocols like DBT and CBT across your entire team. You can show consistent quality standards measured against gold-standard instruments. And you can provide objective outcomes data that ties quality to patient improvement.

This gives you leverage in payer negotiations. When you can prove 85% DBT adherence across 20 clinicians, you're no longer asking for higher rates—you're showing why you've earned them.

This is what value-based care actually means: aligning payment with proven quality. Practices that deliver better outcomes should be rewarded for it. We're building the measurement infrastructure to make that possible.