As Employers Embrace Mental Health Platforms, Clinicians Urge Caution on Tool Choice

Employers are rushing to add mental health platforms to their benefits packages, but many are buying into a quiet disconnect between tech-world optimism and clinical reality. The boom is driven by good intentions to expand access, yet too often therapy is framed as little more than an empathetic conversation. What gets overlooked are the layers clinicians manage in every session: ongoing assessment, regulatory compliance, ethical obligations, and the personal risk to their license. The result is a wave of products that shine in pitch decks but prove unworkable for the therapists expected to deliver care.

Kira Torre, MS, MFT, Founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Ever After Individual & Family Therapy, has spent her career at the intersection of clinical practice and mental health technology. As a licensed therapist, she leads a group practice of 14 clinicians serving over 400 patients. As a strategist, she advises health-tech companies on product development and clinical growth. With one foot in the therapy room and the other in product strategy, Torre sees the gap between how platforms are designed and how care is actually delivered.

"When mental health benefits are built on tech optimism instead of clinical reality, they end up looking great to employers and investors, but are unusable for the therapists responsible for delivering care," says Torre. She believes the problem often starts because product development is inverted. Well-meaning founders with "good hearts" build tools with input from investors, designers, and engineers, but only bring in seasoned clinicians toward the end of the process.

• What lies beneath: Many mental health platforms fail because they’re built around how therapy looks, not how it works. "If a product doesn’t account for privacy, documentation, and safety from the start, it puts clinicians at risk," Torre says. When those realities appear late in development, they’re treated as friction instead of fundamentals. For clinicians, meeting these standards isn’t optional. It’s a professional obligation tied directly to licensure.

• Career on the line: "In the end, I'm the one who has to defend my license," she says. "So, if your product doesn't work for me because it's not keeping me and my license safe, I can't use it." This leads to a predictable and costly failure: a product that gets a green light from every stakeholder except the one who actually has to interact with it.

This same disconnect shows up when employers evaluate these platforms. It can lead benefits teams to focus on broad promises of "access" while overlooking questions that reveal a platform's true stability and quality. Torre advises employers to look past the sales pitch and ask about the clinical workforce itself, as high turnover is often a red flag for a poorly managed platform that results in inconsistent care for employees.

• A revolving door: "One of the hardest things I hear from people is, 'I just had a new therapist every four or five sessions. It was really hard to keep up with.'" And choosing a platform is only the start. Adoption hinges on clarity around session limits, types of care, and who can access employee data. When those answers feel vague, trust erodes and usage drops, regardless of the platform’s technical safeguards. Oversight should focus on the program, not the individual.

• Measure the program, not the patient: Torre recommends anonymous, high-level surveys to assess whether the benefit is working for the organization as a whole. "You actually don't want the individual data. You want the overall data. As a company, do we like working with this platform? Is it working for us? Are people taking advantage? Are they happy with it?" Looking ahead, Torre is hopeful about the technology that will emerge in 2026, but her optimism is focused on a specific model of innovation, one that corrects the foundational flaw she sees across the industry.

As mental health technology continues to evolve, the opportunity lies in co-creating solutions with the clinicians who deliver care. When product design starts with clinical insight, platforms can truly support both therapists and employees, turning good intentions into sustainable, trustworthy mental health benefits that actually work. "I'm so excited to see what's going to be developed," she concludes. "Especially what's developed in conjunction with therapists. Not for therapists, but with therapists."