Headway Therapy Patients Forced to Scan Their Faces to Keep Getting Care

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ppavel_lishin 1 day ago 37 commentsRead Article on 404media.co

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Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

hdwythrowaway•1 day ago

I interviewed with Headway. Fun fact: a bunch of their engineers are ex-Palantir and they use Foundry as part of their data platform.

Don't trust these people with your mental health data.

mountainriver•1 day ago

That is unbelievably terrifying

next_xibalba•1 day ago

Genuinely, why?

antisthenes•1 day ago

Do you know anything about Palantir and their CEO's stances?

sleazebreeze•1 day ago

What exactly is the concern here by Headway? Are they afraid AI deep fakes will be receiving therapy?

Obviously they are doing data collection and selling training data of emotional conversations to AI labs. But what's their stated justification? I can't figure it out.

smelendez•1 day ago

Probably medication fraud.

They mention heightened scrutiny around controlled substances (with amphetamines for ADHD as an example) on the FAQ. https://help.headway.co/hc/en-us/articles/29673299878676-Doc...

The risk is that a drug dealer or addict pays people to use their identities and possibly insurance info, pretends to be them and to have ADHD in telehealth sessions, and stockpiles Adderall.

olyjohn•1 day ago

How many people would you need to stack up in therapy just to get enough Adderall to sell to make money? One person is only going to be able to get a 30 day supply at a time. Most people taking it for recreation are taking much higher doses than prescribed. I don't think that a drug dealer is going to be organized enough to do hour long sessions every week for 30 different people and not get noticed.

smelendez•about 17 hours ago

The ADHD patients aren’t necessarily the ones doing weekly talk therapy. They’re meeting occasionally for a quick chat with a psychiatrist.

I agree, if you’re just doing talk therapy it seems overkill. But they may have concerns about emergencies, where a patient is in crisis and you realize you don’t actually know who they are.

And insurance fraud: Alice has health insurance, her friend Betty does not but needs therapy, so she signs up under Alice’s name (“oh, I actually go by Betty.”)

In general, I don’t think it’s that outlandish that the company wants to know definitively who its patients are and be able to demonstrate it does, but hopefully they can come up with more options for verification.

siva7•1 day ago

Well, that doesn't scale to be worth the risk, and should be immidiately obvious to any dealer with an iq higher than room temperature.

kotaKat•1 day ago

Yeah this feels like an over-excited nothingburger from 404. Of course you need to verify who the hell you're going to write an electronic prescription for a controlled substance is actually who they say they are.

It's literally just a government ID check/liveliness check. In this case... it's needed.

sonofhans•1 day ago

Government-issued IDs work and human verification of them is largely successful. This is not about correct verification, it’s about cheap machine-based verification. The dehumanization of it is part of how they plan to make money.

So yes verification is needed. We can do that just fine without more facial recognition intruding into everyday affairs.

jdgoesmarching•1 day ago

Every user of Headway is required to submit to this, regardless of medication status, or they lose access to the platform (and their therapist).

HN has come a long way if we’re considering it a nothing burger that sending scans of your face to a 3rd party verification company is required to not lose access to your healthcare provider.

wat10000•1 day ago

I've done telehealth from multiple providers and they've never required a biometric scan. If this is "of course" then why would that be?

mystraline•1 day ago

Some people lie about identity when getting mental health. They also direct pay cash, and no insurance.

Pilots and US govt cleared people go through hell, or get their permissions revoked if you try to get mental health. So the answer is to pay out of pocket and lie.

HOWEVER with Peter Thiel's invasive facial recog shit being forced means that even if you want to remain anonymous, now you cant.

As for misappropriation of drugs, that can also easily happen in person. Some Thielian shit isnt going to stop that.

FireBeyond•1 day ago

Meanwhile, on Hims, you fill out a form prior to meeting with the physician via a text-only chat. And if you filled it out "wrong", then the physician tells you that if these were your final answers, you wouldn't meet criteria, but if you had, say, answered x instead of y for q3 and b instead of c for q5, you can get the meds. "Would you like to review your answers for a few minutes?"

kotaKat•1 day ago

Yup, 'cause if the noctor prescribes the script, only then does the noctor gets their paycheck.

germinalphrase•1 day ago

insurance compliance?

dccooper•1 day ago

Oh dang - I actually know the answer here.

TL:DR - Regulations are changing / unclear around prescribing medications online and this is them trying to get ahead of it.

Headway’s new facial-scan requirement is probably less about one company getting weird with biometrics and more about where telehealth regulation is heading: with COVID-era prescribing flexibilities, companies like Done abused controlled substance prescribing to the point that the DEA is now signaling that they will demand stronger identity proofing for controlled-substance prescribing.

But the implementation matters. Could you do all this through other means? Definitely. Would it scale as easily / get in Peter Thiel and VC's good graces by using their tool? Who knows.

All to say this is probably more about changing regulations in how care is provided online - and more companies should be expected to follow suit when it comes to prescribing controlled substances.

mapt•1 day ago

If it turns out that all recordings of your therapy sessions are being absorbed by Palantir and then get leaked to the darkweb, do we execute this CEO on livestream by boat torture, or do they offer you a link good for six months of free identity theft monitoring, and a free session to talk about feelings of violation and loss of your privacy?

The thing you need in therapy is a degree of trust. I'm not sure I would have sufficient trust even if we stipulated the boat torture.

zdragnar•1 day ago

Surely this would affect all online prescribers and third party certification companies, who have been using government ID card verification for years.

I don't think biometric data is necessary at all here.

skeeter2020•1 day ago

What seems more likely for a startup doing online mental health to collect biometric data? 1. "getting ahead" of potentially changing regulations. 2. collecting data they don't need because it's (a) easier and (b) never know when you'll need it!

cortesoft•1 day ago

Could be insurance or prescription drug related. Need to make sure the person getting care is a real person and who they say they are?

zdragnar•1 day ago

This has been a solved problem for some time now. There are already third party solutions for this based around verifying government issued ID cards and therapist attestation of who they visited with in their notes.

Biometric data isn't needed at all.

cm2012•1 day ago

Isn't gov ID + selfie check the standard for a majority of online healthcare in the last few years?

kovek•1 day ago

What if the organization who tries to verify sends a request on an app on the user’s iPhone (or whatever device can do the same), and the user scans their face with FaceID to produce a file send to the organization, which will then send that file to Apple to ask if the file represents the right person? I trust Apple so that works for me.

moffkalast•1 day ago

Please drink verification can to continue.

pryelluw•1 day ago

You mean verification suppositories.

stronglikedan•about 22 hours ago

I mean, if that's the only way to verify, it ain't the worst way...

exabrial•1 day ago

Nope.