December 09, 2021

Brad Kittredge MBA 09 - Delivering Value-Based Telemedicine

41 minutes

Having endured a major health setback, Brad Kittredge was pushed to think of ways to address a lesser-known but more pervasive problem: the lack of quality mental health care. The healthcare sector faces many issues, including bureaucratic structures, guess and check diagnosis systems, and inadequate access. Fast forward to today, Haas alum Brad Kittredge has contributed to the digital health space by developing tools that enable data-driven health care services.

Brad is MBA 09 and the Founder and CEO of Brightside, a company that provides expert depression and anxiety treatment from home comfort.

Listen to this podcast with Brad Kittredge as he tackles the gaps in our health care systems. He impacts the digital health space by building a whole new type of mental health care delivered with telemedicine technology and data.

Episode quotes:

How did the pervasive issue of lack of quality mental health care affect you on a personal level?

[00:06:55] It hit home for me because my father has managed depression my whole life. And I saw the ups and downs that he had as he went over ten years from seeking care to finding a treatment that worked. And so, it just really set me off on this mission of how do I take these tools that I'm excited about and this trend of empowering people to drive their healthcare and apply it to really fixing mental healthcare delivery. That one event of having a personal health setback turned into a positive and set me on a track to do work that I find really interesting and rewarding.

Did you ever doubt that putting all your time, energy, and resources into digital health would pay off?

[00:11:58] I never felt afraid of failing. Maybe that was something I already had, or maybe that was something I learned in part at Haas, being around great people and the things we talk about that you can't do anything great without trying and failing. And so I wasn't worried about that. It didn't hold me back. I, of course, had tremendous self-doubt about whether I could do it or what are my chances of succeeding. But that allure of really trying to build something and create something from scratch, and honestly, the thing that got me over the edge was picturing the people out there that needed help and didn't have any solutions today, and the potential impact we'd have, just feeling that inspiration or even imagining that made it really easy for me to want to take the risk. And it's the thing that really keeps me motivated and going every day.

On what inspires him to continue Brightside on difficult days

[00:14:44] It always comes back to the impact. There are hard days where I go look at our reviews page because the voice of the customer and the feedback of the impact that we're having never ceases to make me feel happy and inspired, and is the reason we're doing it.

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