Birches Health sees a viable lane for meaningful progress to be delivered in the same place where their patients’ problematic behavior occurs: their digital devices.
The New York City-based digital behavioral addiction treatment provider, which announced securing a $20 million funding round in September, sees delivering care in this modality as meeting patients where they are and getting people to care faster and with more support than traditional models, CEO Elliot Rapaport told Behavioral Health Business.
The model also accounts for key generational differences in the patient population.
“Historically, if you were looking for gambling disorder care, option one would be a maze of hotlines,” Rapaport said. “Option two would be 12-step programs. These have done incredible work but, transparently, are not the perfect fit for a lot of the younger — think 18- to 35-year-old individuals — who might be gambling or trading online today.”
A final typical care option would be embarking on the potentially costly journey of finding therapy or more intensive forms of treatment. Rapaport said it’s unlikely that patients would be able to find care on their own, between the severe lack of clinicians who have experience, let alone specialize, in gambling addiction and the potential economic barriers to accessing care.
“In order to meet a population that now engages in gambling and sports betting and trading on prediction markets online, we think you have to move care online,” Rapaport said.
The company recently engaged an external research firm to assess its care outcomes. The analysis of outcomes for care from July 2023 to October 2025 finds that 85% of patients reported reductions in gambling addiction symptoms, as measured by the Gambling Symptom Assessment Scale (G-SAS), after nine interventions. Clinically significant anxiety reductions were found in 68% of the population.
The research also found that early patient retention was 29% higher than the industry benchmark. Rapaport said it used the industry retention benchmark of 28%.
The company treats digital behavioral addictions with an emphasis on gambling addiction. It also treats underlying and co-occurring mental health conditions as well as other process addictions, such as sex and pornography addictions, video gaming addictions and social media addictions.
Birches Health offers patients both abstinence- and harm reduction-focused treatment plans through an integrated clinical services model. Its services include individual, family, couples, group therapy and peer recovery support. It also offers other digital support tools, asynchronous engagement with providers and financial wellness counseling.
Since a 2018 Supreme Court decision that eliminated a federal prohibition on sports betting, there has been a giant increase in the number of people engaging in digital gambling. In recent years, the proliferation of digital equity trading, cryptocurrency speculation and (most recently) prediction markets has captured more users and cash than ever before.
According to an American Psychiatric Association poll, about a third of Americans have a daily gambling habit. Another study suggests that the number of people exhibiting treatment-seeking behavior for gambling addictions spiked following the 2018 Supreme Court decision.
“I think in 2026 and beyond, as the prevalence of addiction to gambling, as well as other behavioral and process addictions … increases, and we begin to see more of the resulting societal impacts — like financial distress, relationship fractures, even perhaps increased hospitalizations and inpatient stays from suicidality — you see that specialized treatment will continue to increase,” Rapaport said. “We wanted to demonstrate that this patient population can actually be treated and treated in a very clinically significant way with specialized care.”