Theris, an AI-powered behavioral health provider, has quietly launched an update to its platform.
Founded in 2023, the startup delivers healthcare and powers it with AI tools for healthcare providers, automating clinical workflows from admission to billing. Once the session takes place, an AI agent records and analyzes the session with the patient’s consent. AI agents can uncover details from a patient’s medical record that a healthcare provider might have missed or flag potential drug interactions.
“Our number one goal is to improve patient outcomes,” co-founder and CEO Anthony Capone told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview.
teris logo
Theris employs behavioral health providers and also has partner providers that use its platform. We have been seeing patients since 2024 and are active in eight states, with a special focus on memory care and substance use disorders. Among its biggest customers is the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Theris extracts digital biomarkers from vocal rhythms and facial microexpressions during sessions and generates treatment planning recommendations. Early data shows that AI-enhanced sessions achieve 94% diagnostic accuracy compared to human psychological assessments, Theris claims. The platform also creates checklists for providers to complete automatically through transcript analysis. If the patient pushes back, the system detects the resistance and alerts the healthcare provider to adjust their approach.
teris session sample
Screenshot of the Theris platform (Theris)
The company’s next step is to become an FDA Class II medical device capable of fully autonomous psychology and psychiatry. “Our contention is that AI-delivered psychotherapy and psychiatry will be reimbursed by private and government payers within the next few years,” Capone said, speaking about FDA-approved medical devices. This “will be an option that many patients seek in addition to traditional human-directed psychotherapy and psychiatry.”
To train healthcare providers, Theris developed an AI patient avatar that responds in real time and guides clinicians through psychiatric intake. This is useful for simulating scenarios. This is especially important for complex patients who are taking many medications.
All patients are alerted that their sessions will be recorded to improve care and that providers are also required to seek verbal consent. Teris patients opt out of records less than 1% of the time. “We are very clear with them about how the data will be used,” Capone said. Data is not shared externally and is anonymized for training purposes. “This is highly sensitive data and we take it seriously.”
Anonymized recordings of each session have been used to train Theris’ AI, spanning more than 150,000 hours of clinical experience to date. This model ranks patient goals higher than patient-reported outcome questionnaires that capture how patients feel, but may not equate to improved quality of life. “How important is it if a patient is feeling less depressed but still can’t get out of bed?” Capone pointed out.
My goal is to reach 1 million training hours by next year. Each Theris model is built on the open source base model Qwen and specializes in a specific diagnostic category. Theris owns the code for the models and the models reside on their own servers. According to Capone, behavioral health is “one of the most surprising applications of large-scale language models.” Because they’re very good at analyzing language, and that’s what talk therapy is all about. “Words are the cure,” he pointed out.
Theris accepts commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare plans in most states. To support billing, Theris generates structured clinical notes that match provider documentation templates and writes them directly into the patient’s chart. Theris accomplishes this through integration with multiple EHRs. “It’s very easy for a provider to get rejected by an insurance company…or they just don’t get paid what they’re owed,” Capone said. “In most cases, they’ve already done this work, but they’re missing the billing code.”
Theris also captures video-derived vital information, such as heart rate and breathing rate, from a patient’s webcam without the need for a wearable. Between sessions, Tellis checks in with her patients daily by asking them one question about how they’re feeling to monitor symptoms.
The startup was self-launched by its founders, who spent two years stealthly building, training, and refining their AI model. Since then, the company has raised multiple rounds of funding, but details have not been disclosed. Although the company is kept private, Telis clinicians currently see patients in hundreds of facilities, including frugal living facilities, Veterans Affairs community residences, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living communities, and K-12 schools.
This week, one of Theris’ practice group subsidiaries was accepted into the CMS ACCESS model to participate in value-based behavioral health care.
“At DocGo, we treated more than 1 million patients over six years, most of them in underserved communities, and saved thousands of lives by bringing advanced technology to emergency care. That experience is the driving force behind everything we are building at Theris,” said Capone, DocGo’s former CEO who resigned from the company in 2023 amid scandal.
