Radial’s Myrtle Beach clinic
Radial
Radial announced the acquisition of Mindful Health Solutions’ management services organization (MSO), creating a combined network of 27 clinics and over 100 clinicians across seven states that specialize in bringing emerging treatments to patients in psychiatry and neurology.
The deal is the latest sign of maturity in neurotech and psychedelic-assisted treatment markets. As I wrote last month psychiatry is embracing these new precision treatments driven, by patient demand for alternatives to antidepressants:
“TMS is growing at nearly eight percent a year, on course to exceed a half a billion dollars by 2030. Today, Esketamine and ketamine treatments are already worth an estimated $1.5 and $3.5 billion respectively. Meanwhile, the administration has softened its regulatory stance on psychedelic medicines, which could introduce new treatments in the coming years.”
The newly combined company will operate under the Radial brand, with an integrated leadership team led by Radial’s CEO John Capecelatro. In an interview last week Capecelatro said “As we think about the acquisition and the subsequent scale of the network we’re at today, we’re really excited about deliberately, carefully, and thoughtfully supporting any new intervention coming to market.”
I spoke with Radial’s co-founder and chief scientific officer Dr. Owen Muir about what this deal means for patients, payers, and neurotechnology partners.
The Business of Scaling Precision Treatments
When I asked how this will impact the hundreds of thousands of patient encounters across the combined network. Muir described two major goals: faster time to the first appointment, and making a broader range of treatments available to more people.
“What we were looking for wasn’t just to acquire a bunch of clinics,” he said. “It was to scale our technology workflow and philosophy of patient care. We think of every patient as the customer and focus on their experience as the north star. And it turns out that Mindful Health Solutions did too. They just didn’t have the technology necessary to make it the kind of seamless customer experience that patients expect in 2026.”
Expanding access to accelerated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) treatments for more patients was foundational to Radial’s launch last year; the new footprint will scale their modern approach by retrofitting it to Mindful Health Solutions’ practice sites.
Currently available offerings that will be systematically expanded into Mindful Health Solution’s network based on payer coverage and other factors include the FDA-cleared SWIFT protocol from BrainsWay, Ampa One TMS, PRISM EEG-fMRI neurofeedback for PTSD, ProlivRx for depression, and Magnus Medical’s SAINT treatment, which requires an fMRI to target the precise location in the brain for treatment.
Radial has also led clinical translation of emerging treatments through operating clinical trials. One of these trials involves Sanmai, a startup backed by Reid Hoffman which is developing transcranial focused ultrasound for people with Parkinson’s disease and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Beyond neurotech, Radial and Mindful Health Solutions have each pioneered clinical delivery of Spravato and ketamine therapy.
“The other thing that all of us are getting ready for together is the coming of psychedelic medicines,” said Muir. He predicted that psilocybin will be approved for depression as well as cluster headache, among other conditions. “I think these conditions reflect brain circuit problems, and a unified group of clinicians using a unified group of skills should treat them.”
He credits Mindful Health Solutions director of psychedelics medicines Dr. Alison McInnes and chief medical officer Dr. Tobias Marton as “true leaders in the field of psychedelic medicine,” noting that the former worked with Radial’s Chief product officer Dr. Carlene MacMillan for five years at Osmind, a specialty electronic record system for psychedelic clinics. With existing leadership connections and strong business alignment, the acquisition talks came together quickly “like pieces of a puzzle,” said Muir.
Radial has already made strong progress along its plan to integrate clinical care and operations across the new enterprise. This includes building new partnerships with MRI centers to expand access to SAINT, standardizing clinical trial operations for future replication to new sites, and scaling Radial’s digital practice infrastructure for billing and clinical workflow, including RadialOS, a clinical decision support AI, across the newly acquired clinics.
From Psychiatry vs Neurology to Brain Medicine
Today, physicians train in specialties like psychiatry, neurology, or pain medicine, before practicing in one area. Muir describes Radial as a cross-disciplinary care model, shaped less by physicians’ past training and more by evidence of which effective technologies and innovations are available today.
“What we saw is that it doesn’t matter what the coverage policy is now. It matters what the coverage policy should be or will be,” he said. “We saw there was a unified toolkit of approaches to treat brain disorders, and this includes things that are not traditionally psychiatry.”
Muir described the management of migraine, movement disorders, depression, PTSD, and other conditions as part of a broader category of brain medicine. Sleep medicine offers a template of what brain medicine might one day look like, with cross-functional clinical training that incorporates pulmonary critical care, neurology, and psychiatry as initial residencies.
“There are so many things that we can do with our tools,” he said. “And what we’re building is a way for clinicians to get comfortable with and great at using novel therapeutics that have a better safety and efficacy profile than anything that’s ever come before.”
Muir described a patient-centered business model treating different disorders rather than medical categories of conditions. He also suggested the market opportunity for better care delivery is big enough for multiple companies with different approaches. “Brain disorders is a bigger TAM than mental health,” he pointed out. “Mental health doesn’t mean much. It’s a subset of a larger total addressable market.”
What’s In it For Payers?
As insurance coverage has begun to catch up with clinical evidence of better remission rates, regional plans have started covering these treatments: Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield in Washington covers SWIFT, while Blue Cross of California covers SAINT. Radial’s existing sites accept insurance from Medicare, TRICARE, the VA, Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare and Blues plans.
I asked Muir what the combined clinic will need to do to demonstrate greater value to its payer partners. “Step one needed to be scale,” he said, explaining that Radial had begun talking to their payer partners a year back. “Payers need to see scale in order to justify larger coverage policies, because they don’t want to negotiate onesie-twosie contracts.”
What makes more financial and operational sense for health plans, he adds, is building value-based contracts on better outcomes, enabled by Radial’s holistic approach to identifying and delivering appropriate treatments. Muir points out the cost savings and clinical value of reducing inpatient psychiatric hospitalization as a tangible example of material cost savings, mentioning a recent study of the downstream health and economic costs of hospitalizing people undergoing a mental health crisis.
“We need to have interventions that work and work fast to keep people out of settings where they are not best served,” he argued.
Translating Scientific Innovation Into Better Care
As part of this acquisition, Muir has taken on a new role of chief scientific officer to drive industry partnerships across neurotechnology and psychedelic treatment companies. He mentions Compass, BrainsWay, Magnus Medical, Ampa Health, PeakLogic, Sanmai, Psyrin, Videra Health, as some of the companies with whom Radial has run or will be running clinical trials. Radial’s clinical network has published over 360 pieces of peer-reviewed research on such emerging treatments.
“Time to coverage policy is my metric,” Muir said, “because without a policy, you don’t have access. And without access, patients don’t get it. One of the keys for my department, which is doing both clinical trials and post-marketing data back into the ecosystem for the future, is to find the right industry partners to work with and build a tight relationship.”
Muir described his and Radial’s role advancing BrainsWay’s foray into accelerated TMS, behind the scenes as a catalyst, then assisting in the product development process, and ultimately as a trial site, helping bring the treatment to market where it received swift coverage. Last month, BrainsWay became a minority investor in the company.
“There are a lot of bits and pieces that we need to make work,” he said. “It’s managing and boiling down that complexity, distilling it into something that payers can understand and manage and put into their business plans, and that patients can fit into their lives.”
Radial discerns when selecting trial partners, Muir said, seeking potential for clinical impact rather than revenue. “We’re primarily looking at things that are going to make a huge difference in the lives of patients. We don’t actually have to maximize profit on clinical trials as part of the business. We’re running trials so that we can know, when it comes to market, how to get it to our patients faster and more effectively.”
Part of the continuum between studying new treatments in FDA trials and delivering them following approval is a robust approach to clinical observation of patients. Here, Muir describes another layer of neurotechnologies uncommonly found in standard clinical practice, from vocal biomarkers, video observation, to more conventional imaging analysis. These emerging tools, also developed by various startups, help Radial observe patient response over the course of treatment, in part to monitor their health, and in part to help build prediction models on responsiveness and eligibility, boosting precision of care for future patients.
“There’s a convergence here of: can we take EEG, MRI, fMRI, vocal data, extraocular gaze, video capture, and traditional clinician- and patient-rated scales, and understand what we should do and what we should do next for the benefit of the patient, better than a narrative alone can let us?”
When I suggest that investors have tended to dismiss such diagnostic aids and monitoring tools because they are challenging business models to make money, Muir argued that payers will disagree.
“I never want to have to guess what’s right for you. There’s a tremendous amount of value in not stumbling through ineffective treatments until you finally find the right one,” he said. “If we can get it to One Shot, and with a pre-test probability to know what’s the best treatment for you, that’s a better state of the world by a long shot for the patient, who is our customer. Payers will be pleased because they won’t have to pay for subsequent trials of things that were unlikely to be effective, which we literally could have predicted.”
When I ask what else investors are missing in looking at today’s emerging markets, Muir described a general misunderstanding of patient preferences for care access. “I think investors are paying too much attention to the amount of time it takes to do something,” he said, “because they can’t imagine a patient might want to have an experience longer than two hours.”
Patients want to get better, he expounded, on a timeline convenient to their schedule, but above all in an effective way that lets them return to living their life, rather than continuing with convenient but ineffective treatment as usual. This is one of the reasons why some of Radial’s sites are open seven days a week.
“We are building a business focused on the patient as the customer,” Muir explained. “The real competition we’re up against is essentially Netflix and home wine delivery, right? It’s things that let you limp along and numb out and not live a full, rich life, but kind of get by day to day.”