[dhruvmanchala]

Hi everyone,

Our company, Neb, offers a free service to help you find a mental healthcare provider. You can submit a form or schedule a phone call to explain your needs and we come back to you with a few available matches within a week.

* we personally call all providers first to ensure they're available and a fit

* therapists and providers who can prescribe medication

* specialty, availability, culture, and other factors are taken into account

* in-network or affordable options if needed

* we can call your insurance on your behalf to help you understand your coverage

* based in San Jose, available anywhere in California

We formed our company in January and launched with another idea in mental health in June. We just finished Startup School, and launched this service last month. We’ve had 20 users for this service so far.

We did a lot of user interviews and found that the process of finding a mental healthcare provider is really complicated. You have to reach out to a lot of providers, it takes time, you have to call people, information online is outdated, and people don’t know what to look for.

If you want help looking for a therapist, please check out our website (www.neb.health). Otherwise, feel free to ask us any questions. Thanks!

[TeMPOraL]

Good: the form claims to be HIPAA-compliant, and doesn't seem to be doing evil stuff.

Bad: my uBlock Origin blocked 8 resources on the page, including scripts from Google and Facebook.

[dhruvmanchala]

The form vendor is JotForm (https://www.jotform.com/), and we have a BAA (business associates agreement) with them.

We have Google and Facebook pixels from when we were running ads. What are your thoughts on that? You would have to browse in incognito, because of how many sites have pixels, and not use Gmail/Messenger/Whatsapp if you didn't want to disclose the fact you're searching for a mental healthcare provider to Google or Facebook.

[TeMPOraL]

> You would have to browse in incognito

Or with a recent version of Firefox. Or with an ad blocker. My thoughts are this: just because most users will likely leave trace with Google by visiting from SERP, doesn't mean you should volunteer more data points for third party advertisers, especially when we're talking medically relevant data. And there will be users who will visit your site via links from other sites where they weren't tracked (e.g. from here!). So please don't do this.

[dewey]

How would you know it's doing evil stuff from the outside though?

[TeMPOraL]

I wouldn't, but the last time we had a story here where mental health websites were sending sensitive data to advertisers, they did it in such a dumb way you could spot it easily on the network tab of your browser's dev tools. Haven't seen anything like here in my brief look.

[dhruvmanchala]

The form, where we collect user data, is not hosted by us, and is hosted by a HIPAA-compliant vendor. What particular data was being shared in your story?

[TeMPOraL]

https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3194/privacy-inte...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877945

[kube-system]

Other than the fact that Facebook and Google know that you’re looking for therapists...

[cfitz]

Including the Google Analytics library and Facebook Pixel on your site at the very least sends each and every pageview back to both of those entities. If the developer has implemented custom conversions, even further behavior is tracked.

[dhruvmanchala]

What are your thoughts on having those pageviews tracked? We could turn them off if people weren't comfortable.

[csunbird]

What is your source of revenue? How do you make money from this ?

[RandomBacon]

Usually referral fees.

Be careful with referral agencies:

https://www.recoveryanswers.org/resource/scams-corruption-ad...

[jaysh]

Curious to know this too. It doesn't seem unreasonable to grow the service to a model eventually where e.g. you charge a fixed price and get an initial consultation with a therapist + their research and setup as a single fee.

[dhruvmanchala]

We aren't planning to charge users at the moment, actually, that's too much friction. We would charge mental healthcare providers.

[dhruvmanchala]

We aren't making any money right now. We want to charge a subscription fee for therapists down the line, but we want to first perfect our solution.

[compuguy]

> based in San Jose, available anywhere in California*

Hopefully you will expand this service to other states, especially ones on the east coast...

[dhruvmanchala]

We plan to!