Triplemoon started with a simple goal: To make it easier for kids and families to access mental health care. The challenge now is growing that approach without losing what makes it work. For Lauren Gage, who founded Triplemoon, the focus is on growth without compromising discipline.
“We are not a business that is trying to drive rapid volume expansion at the cost of experience and outcomes. We are focused on experience and outcomes first,” Gage told the California Business Journal in an exclusive interview.
That focus guides every decision Triplemoon makes today.
Triplemoon uses the term “clinical ecosystem” to describe how they approach delivering care. The company’s collaborative care model integrates family-centric mental health services directly into a primary care setting. Collaborative care brings together kids, families, primary care doctors, social workers, and child psychiatrists. The whole system relies on teamwork, regular feedback, and shared experience.
As Triplemoon has expanded into seven states (California, Colorado, Tennessee, Nevada, Maryland, Florida, and Texas), the company focuses on delivering an exceptional experience across the ecosystem in each community.
“The environment for collaborative care isn’t the same from one state to another. We’re very purposeful about the markets we enter and the types of primary care clinics we serve. Our geographic footprint has to map to our mission,” she said. Triplemoon’s approach is about making sure every move fits the bigger plan.
The plan has two main parts. Building a strong clinical system and curating the technology that supports it to deliver the right experience at the right time. Both must work together. If you have great care but weak systems, things get stuck. If you have tech without people to guide it, the meaning gets lost.
“We’re building tools that allow every human in that ecosystem to practice at the top of their license. Our technical product drives automation so that our team humans can focus on building relationships,” Gage said.
That means cutting out the busywork (scheduling, follow-ups, paperwork, and tracking cases) so clinicians can focus on their patient relationships. It also means making sure primary care doctors always know what’s happening with each patient’s care. Technology must exist to protect clinicians’ bandwidth.
Clinical Outcomes as the North Star
Strong evidence supports collaborative care, including over 90 randomized controlled trials. The real challenge is putting it into practice.
“We want our patients to get better, faster. That means applying the right behavioral intervention at the right time, personalized to each patient,” Gage said. Triplemoon enables this through a first-of-its-kind, evidence-based clinical system. “Our time with patients should be short if we’re doing our job right, and so we support our clinicians’ expertise with structured clinical programs that are designed to improve outcomes in under twelve months.” An interdisciplinary clinical team, including psychiatrists, reviews each case; social workers handle the behavioral work; and primary care doctors stay involved with medication decisions.
The aim is measurable progress. Gage talks about patients “graduating” on purpose. Kids should leave care stronger than when they started; healthier, happier, and ready to thrive.
That kind of progress affects more than just the child. It leaves a profound impact on their families, clinicians’ workloads, and society at large. “As a mother of a 3-year-old, I have a deep understanding of the need for Triplemoon’s services,” Gage said. From her own experience, she knows how important it is for “every family to have access to the mental health resources they need—when they need them.” Gage envisions a world where the headlines might look a little different for the next generation.
As Triplemoon has expanded, the company has observed patterns that extend beyond the individual child. Families report deeper engagement. Parents become more aware of their own behavioral patterns. Primary care providers regain between five and eleven hours per week, time that would otherwise be spent navigating complex mental health cases without specialist support. “Clinics are also making more money. Not only by adding reimbursable services but also by decreasing overhead costs,” Gage said.
When collaborative care is set up right, it helps providers feel less alone. It spreads out responsibility and makes the whole clinic stronger.
Traditional Tension Between Growth and Discipline
Triplemoon recently raised $3.5 million in seed funding from LiveOak Ventures and Activate Venture Partners. Most startups would use that money to hire fast and grow quickly. Gage knows that temptation well. “There’s a knee-jerk reaction in a venture-backed world to grow, grow, grow really fast. It’s really hard to introduce quality and culture after,” she said.
Instead of rushing to grow, as Gage says, Triplemoon has worked purposefully with the support of its investors to define its clinical model and systems first. “I am grateful to have an incredibly supportive board that has encouraged us to focus on experience, clinical quality and company culture.”
For Gage, culture must be built into the product and the way the company runs from the beginning. “It has to be ingrained in the technical product. It has to be ingrained in the clinical system. When you build it that way, the system reinforces itself.”
In pediatric mental health, where burnout is common and the work is intense, such a corporate culture is a must. It helps protect everyone. Triplemoon uses a team-based care model and closely monitors the number of cases each clinician handles. Weekly reviews help providers feel connected, and shared systems mean no one is left working alone. Collaboration is part of the company’s culture and care model from the boardroom to the patient video calls.
Signaling its commitment to deep quality, experience, and culture, Triplemoon recently added Dr Caroline Carney to its Board of Directors. Dr Carney is the CEO of Magellan Health, one of the nation’s leading mental health managed care organizations, and she is also a practising double board-certified psychiatrist and internist. Prior to joining Magellan, Dr Carney served as the medical director for the Indiana Office of Medicaid Policy and Planning. She is also the author of over 100 peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications on the topic of behavioral health.
Gage sees this appointment as a structural move.
“After getting to know Dr Carney personally, I feel fortunate to add her clinical experience, knowledge, and leadership to our team,” Gage said. “She has touched so many areas of our healthcare system.” In the United States, primary care functions as the de facto mental health system, delivering roughly half of mental health care services, which puts a heavy load on those providers. According to Gage, Carney understands how Triplemoon’s behavioral health model can improve not only the well-being of patients and families but also the clinics and providers who support them.
Competing in a Crowded Digital Landscape
Digital mental health is now one of the most crowded areas in healthcare. Investors have poured money into platforms that offer convenience, direct-to-consumer therapy, and apps.
Gage sees Triplemoon’s defensibility in its focus on meeting patients and providers where they already seek services. “We have a single model: Collaborative care. We are not distracted by multiple models.”
Triplemoon has focused on families from the start. Family care needs its own expertise, more education and coordination across caregivers, downstream services, and, importantly, schools. Everything at Triplemoon, from hiring to product design to clinical care protocols, is shaped by a focus on families, according to Gage.
The company also approaches behavioral health as a system problem, not a transactional service. Clinical care includes a broad mandate: Therapy, medication management, coordination with schools, referrals to downstream services, occupational or speech therapy when needed, and structured education for families. However, most importantly, care requires deep relationships with every patient and provider in the ecosystem.
“You can find basic therapy. What’s harder to compete with is a deeply integrated clinical system that serves the child, the family, and the primary care provider together in the way they want to be served,” Gage said. Bringing all these pieces together helps fix one of the biggest problems in U.S. mental health care: Everything is too fragmented.
Redefining Value-based Care
If Triplemoon’s model grows as planned, its impact will reach far beyond the clinic. Gage sees a future where families are healthier. Caregivers get more support, kids get help sooner, and primary care doctors can focus on what they do best instead of handling mental health alone. “Triplemoon’s mission is to add years to life and life to years for everyone in our ecosystem,” Gage said.
She also sees financial benefits. Behavioral health often improves outcomes for other comorbid conditions. For example, a child with diabetes who gets mental health support may stick to their treatment plan better. Anxiety and depression can make physical health problems worse. Helping kids’ mental health can lower future medical costs across the board.
Over time, insurers may come to see collaborative care as a way not only to deliver exceptional care but also to control population health costs. “This is a real value-based care model, and deploying collaborative care more broadly should meaningfully shift overall population health,” Gage said. The vision is big, so Triplemoon’s approach must stay careful.
The Long View
In the mid-term, success for Triplemoon will mean maintaining high-quality clinical care as the company expands into additional states. It will mean primary care doctors have manageable workloads. And it will mean families see mental health support as a normal part of care, not just something for emergencies.
Triplemoon has opened the front door and put its collaborative model into action. The next step is to deepen the structure, ensuring growth builds on what made the model work in the first place.
If Triplemoon succeeds, its impact could reach far beyond pediatric mental health. It could show that healthcare can scale without sacrificing clinical integrity. In a system as stretched as U.S. mental health care, finding that balance might be the most important innovation of all.
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