NOCD Announces Plans for National Expansion of Intensive Outpatient Therapy

[NOCD Expands Its Intensive Outpatient Therapy Program Nationwide, Strengthening Access to Specialty OCD Care]

NOCD, a virtual provider for obsessive-compulsive disorder, announced Tuesday that it is committing to expanding its virtual intensive outpatient program nationwide. The company’s program, NOCD Intensive Outpatient Therapy, connects patients with OCD to therapists who specialize in exposure and response prevention therapy — a form of cognitive behavioral therapy designed specifically for individuals with OCD.

The program works with payers and currently has a network of over 1,000 therapists. It supports individuals with severe OCD and related disorders and is already available in Colorado, Montana, Michigan, and Texas. Waitlists are currently open in six additional states. Through this program, members attend three hours of structured treatment per day, five days a week. The treatment includes a combination of group and individual exposure and response prevention therapy.

Members transition to intensive care when outpatient exposure and response therapy proves insufficient, then step back down to outpatient treatment as they improve.

“We’ve seen that some people need more than weekly therapy given the severity of their symptoms, and historically we’ve referred them out to intensive outpatient program services,” said David Cohn, general manager of intensive therapy programs at NOCD’s parent brand, Noto. “Many of those programs, even the virtual ones, weren’t built around specialty OCD treatment, and members too often came back without lasting progress. We built NOCD Intensive Outpatient Therapy to change that: more frequent, more structured exposure and response prevention, delivered by OCD specialists, in the environments where members’ symptoms actually occur.”

The intensive outpatient therapy program currently accepts private pay, and in-network insurance coverage is expanding through Noto’s existing health plan partnerships. The company did not provide a timeline for when it will complete its national expansion of the program.

Intensive OCD care has historically been very difficult to access, according to Cohn. Before NOCD, OCD-specialty care was nearly impossible to access in-network because OCD’s prevalence and total cost weren’t being properly identified in payer claims. Roughly 2 to 3 percent of the population suffers from OCD. Left untreated, people with OCD are 10 times more likely to die by suicide, and the condition drives tens of billions in excess annual healthcare spend. Yet that story wasn’t visible, because the cost was being misattributed to other condition-specific populations. As a result, neither outpatient nor intensive outpatient services were built at scale for OCD.

By expanding the program nationwide, the company ultimately hopes to provide a true continuum of specialty OCD care that allows members to receive the right level of treatment for their needs.

“In the near term, that means expanding the program’s state footprint and partnering with health plans to make it broadly accessible through insurance,” he said. “Longer term, we want to prove this model works for OCD and extend it to other specialty conditions where the same gap exists between weekly therapy and facility-based care.”

Photo: elenabs, Getty Images

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