Get to Know Julian Cohen, UpLift Chief Clinical Services Officer

UpLift’s “Get to Know” series features providers so that other providers can get to know them, learn from each other, and connect. 

This month, we’ve featured Julian Cohen, who guides UpLift’s clinical direction to ensure that we provide quality care to clients by supporting our providers.

What are you passionate about when it comes to mental health care?

I've been in mental health care for more than 30 years. My passion has always been around providing access to quality care, because that's been a long standing issue for decades. 

I've had the opportunity to see what happens when we’re unable to address mental health issues for individuals, regardless of severity. The effect that access can have on someone's life long-term is huge. 

When I started working in mental health, the stigma around talking about it or getting care was a significant hindrance to access. No one wanted to say, “I have a therapist or psychiatrist.” Now that's changed a lot today, and in some cases, you know, it's almost like a badge of honor to say, “I'm in therapy.” People are more open about issues that affect their lives. Whether they seem minor or are more acute, having access to quality services can have a meaningful impact on your life, your relationships, your job, and your overall health.

What inspired you to get into behavioral healthcare?

I came out of a family of psychiatrists and social workers, so it was something I grew up with. I saw what was happening. I saw the value of mental health care in the people around me. 

Interestingly, while I always wanted to be to do something in healthcare, I realized as I got older, I really didn't want to be a doctor. I did become a social worker, but my focus through most of my career has been on the business or the operational side of clinical care: how do we do things clinically in a way that’s good for the patient and good for the provider? 

I like to work on problems like ensuring that care can be delivered in a consistent manner, yet understanding and balancing that in mental health, one patient is not the center patient. Everybody is different, and I firmly believe everybody needs to be treated as an individual and looked at as an individual. I went on and got a Master's in Public Health and Healthcare Administration. 

In the early part of my career, I did some work in hospitals as a hospital administrator, but quickly moved over to working solely in behavioral health-oriented opportunities and companies. The real opportunities for me to have an effect and make change were not in the hospital environments but rather in startup or early stage companies working on mental health. 

You have to remember: I came out of grad school in the early 80s. The late 80s, early 90s were the real beginnings of managed behavioral healthcare. I quickly moved into working with one of the very first managed behavioral healthcare companies in the country when it was still small, MCC Mental Health based out of Minnesota. We built that into a fairly big business that we sold to Cigna, which actually became Cigna Behavioral Health.

How does your role support providers?

If you want to have providers who are providing quality care, you have to give them the tools to make their job easier and more focused on the clinical part. You help them actually treat their clients. 

A big piece of what UpLift does is to take on all of that back-of-house business stuff that providers have to do. In particular, we deal with insurance companies and credentialing and all the pieces that come with it so providers have the opportunity to focus more on the care that they’re providing to people. 

Part of the reason we built our own EMR was because we didn’t think that a lot of what was out there included what was important to providers to make their job easy. We made it easy for the provider to complete medical records, and we built it in a way that lets us oversee and monitor the quality of care in a way that isn’t intrusive to the provider. We don’t have to bother them to show us their charts: It’s been structured. 

We have a great clinical team overseeing quality with Kathleen and Danielle. They do a tremendous job of evaluating the outcomes, how providers are doing, and how patients are doing. That’s the key to our overall success. 

What does your role entail?

I've been in the industry for a long time, so I've made a lot of the mistakes that young companies make. Hopefully, I've helped us to avoid a lot of those as we've grown. 

My role touches the organization anywhere that there's clinical decisions that need to be made. 

In the marketplace, there are companies that have had to deal with big penalties because they built a clinical service that was focused on one thing and one thing only—and it was not the quality of care. 

It’s my job to make sure we do things correctly from a clinical perspective, that we take into account the regulations and outcomes of everything we do, and to assure that we are providing good quality of care. We use leading edge technology and do it appropriately. 

One of the ways we do that is how we approach psychiatry: Some telehealth organizations don’t offer psychiatric services or prescriptions for controlled substances because it’s more difficult. At UpLift, we want to be able to service patient populations that are everything from “worried well” up to those patients who are severely mentally ill. To do that, we need to be able to use controlled substances appropriately. So we do that and we also monitor it as part of our quality program. 

We understand that in today’s world, there are people who are specifically looking to get narcotics. Unfortunately, there are companies that allow that to happen. UpLift isn’t one of them, and we won’t be. We want to do things right. We want to help people feel better.

Why did you choose UpLift?

I've been involved in a number of mental health startups, several of which have been very successful. Over time, something that I've learned is most of the telehealth companies that are out there focus more on people who are low acuity. When I met Kyle Talcott, we very much clicked on our desire to provide more than that: to provide higher levels of acuity, and to ultimately be able to provide value-based services. 

To me, that was very much the logical next step, to continue to use technology appropriately to deal with a broader population than what you typically see.

What is the best mental health care article or resource that you've read recently?

I look at and read everything. I'm a little bit of a news hound, and I follow various publications. 

Something I’m interested in learning more about is AI. I’m still very cautious about using it in direct clinical services, but I do see the value of using it in certain circumstances to make tools more efficient and easier to use. I’m not convinced that we [as an industry] can just do everything with AI.

There would need to be a balance between a person and the clinical aspect and the therapeutic relationship. You have to actually provide services. 

What is your favorite way to practice self-care?

I am lucky enough to live on the water and to have a boat. Getting to go out on the boat and explore is total relaxation. It puts you in nature and lets you disengage from the work environment. The process of having the boat, working on the boat, using the boat is a tremendous distraction from the regular day-to-day of the world. 

We have a 15 and a half-year-old rescue that we got when he was 5. He had been terribly abused, and was very shy.

We did the DNA test on him twice because we didn't believe he was 40% Chihuahua as well as a Poodle, and Terrier, but he sort of looks like a miniature Schnauzer, more than anything else. 

He's getting a little old. We take him everywhere. He goes on the boat with us. He just got a baby stroller. Right now, he’s lying behind me. He’s got beds in my office and my wife’s office, and spends most of his day in one or the other beds snoring. 

Is there a book that you enjoyed that you would recommend to anyone?

I love sci fi and fantasy. I like any of the Anne McCaffrey books, and the Dragonriders of Perth series.