How Headspace Health created a culture of cyber awareness

PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

Headspace Health is changing the way the world thinks about mental healthcare, delivering beloved meditation and mindfulness exercises and one-on-one care anytime, anywhere.

In 2021, Headspace and Ginger joined forces to form Headspace Health, the world's most comprehensive and accessible mental healthcare platform. In the midst of a growing mental health crisis, Headspace Health set out to democratise mental healthcare so people everywhere could get the care they need when they need it. Today, Headspace Health touches nearly 100m lives worldwide through its brands Headspace, Ginger, and Headspace for Work.

Puneet Thapliyal is the Chief Information Security Officer at Headspace Health. Joining the company in 2016 when it was a Silicon Valley startup, and had zero revenue and zero customers, Headspace is now a company of more than 1,100 people, with revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It's been an incredible journey and a great opportunity, and I feel lucky to be part of this journey,” he says. “Prior to starting at Headspace Health, I was CEO of my own security product company called Trusted Passage. I wanted to be part of a company that has a large impact on the world, and I got introduced to Ginger in 2016.

“When I talked to the founding team, I was very impressed by the vision they

How Headspace Health created a culture of cyber awareness

had of solving mental healthcare for the whole world. I wanted to be part of the journey, and that was how I got into digital healthcare,” adds Thapliyal. “The company itself was building a tele-mental healthcare platform, which just five or six years ago was unheard of. I wanted to contribute as much as possible to make it a reality and, fast forward to today, it's a very mainstream offering.”

On a mission to solve mental healthcare for everybody in the world, Headspace Health offers a whole spectrum of services, from mindfulness tools to CBT, coaching, therapy, and psychiatry. The service starts with the mobile app, which helps users with meditation and helps users build good daily habits around sleep breathing.

“That is a consumer offering, so anyone could go to the app store and download and start using that and help themselves get better,” Thapliyal comments. “Beyond that, if you need a little bit more help, then you are able to talk to a life coach, through text and video, for your subclinical needs.

“If you have a certain situation where you need clinical help, then you are able to elevate the service level to clinical where you can now schedule time with a therapist or psychiatrist, get medication, or whatever it takes to get you into a better state from a mental healthcare standpoint,” he explains. “That's the vision of the company: to focus on outcomes and to make sure anyone who comes and uses our service is able to get better from a mental healthcare standpoint.”

Helping remove the mental health stigma

Millions of people worldwide are living with a mental health condition, not helped by the COVID-19 pandemic which exacerbated mental health concerns, with a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation finding that nearly half of adults in the United States reported symptoms of depression or anxiety during the subsequent global lockdowns.

According to Headspace Health, mindfulness and meditation can positively impact mental and physical health, whether by reducing stress, improving sleep, increasing focus, or improving relationships.

“Our core mission is to build a service where mental healthcare is easily accessible to everybody in the world. We want to see a world where mental health is never an obstacle for anyone,” Thapliyal says.

Building this world is a huge challenge.

According to a recent World Health Organisation study, about one in eight people – a billion people worldwide – suffer from some kind of mental health disorder. Of those, Thapliyal comments, about 75% of them never even get any help for their mental healthcare.

Puneet Thapliyal

TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION SECURITY OFFICER

INDUSTRY: MENTAL HEALTH CARE

LOCATION: CALIFORNIA, US

Puneet is the Chief Information Security Officer at Headspace Health where he heads up overall strategy and direction of product and IT security as well as member data privacy. He is a seasoned cybersecurity and networking executive with previous stints at Yahoo! and Oracle. Puneet is an active member of the OWASP, Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) where he actively contributes towards security emerging research topics such as the Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) and Cloud Standards activities. He has extensive experience with cloud security and has helped build one of the first Firewall As A Service (FAAS) offerings. He holds multiple technology patents including in the areas of Web App Security and Multicast Protocol Congestion Control.