New CEO drives ieso Digital Health towards glory in the US

Kent Tangen has more than 25 years experience building and scaling businesses across healthcare, financial services, retail, supply chain, media, and education. His career is marked by his ability to lead global teams through pivotal moments including mergers, acquisitions, digital transformation, and rapid growth.

ieso’s digital-first product, the ieso Digital Program, is being piloted in the US on the back of a successful UK clinical trial. The programme is built on the foundation of clinical rigour and the integration of clinical, scientific and AI expertise that ieso is known for.

Analysing more than 750,000 hours of anonymised therapy sessions from over 135,000 patients, it is one of the largest datasets of its kind. Through its unique data set, ieso believes it has developed a deep understanding of the relationship between patient/therapist language and outcomes – and applied what it has learned about these “active ingredients” to develop its new program.

Tangen said: “Mental healthcare is facing a watershed moment. The gap between those who need care and those who can access it grows wider every day.

“I can think of no greater humanitarian, healthcare or economic challenge of our time than solving the global mental health crisis. At ieso, we’re not just building technology for technology’s sake – we’re developing solutions that can help the one in five American adults who live with mental illness and the one in eight people worldwide who do.”

ieso, a former Business of the Year in this medium’s annual awards competition, is a venture-backed mental health technology company with an audacious goal: solve the global mental health access crisis.

For 20 years it has been one of the UK’s largest providers of online mental health treatment to the NHS, bringing therapist-delivered, text-based cognitive behavioural therapy to more than 135,000 NHS patients and building the world’s largest outcomes-indexed mental health data set.

Its AI-driven platform, built on insights from 750,000+ therapy hours and rigorous clinical research, is said to deliver faster results, more affordably and at scale.

“By integrating clinical expertise with responsible AI, we help payers, health systems, and employers offer immediate access to high-quality mental healthcare at a fraction of traditional costs,” the company says.