Justine Lai is Vice President and General Manager of Specialty Care Solutions at Lyra Health, where she leads the vision, development, and commercial success of employer-facing solutions for specialty and high acuity care. Previously, Justine led operations for Lyra’s therapy network. She holds an MBA from The Wharton School in Innovation Management, and a BA in Psychology and Sociology from Barnard College.

Lyra Health is a mental health care company that partners with employers, universities, and organizations to make high-quality support easy to access for their communities. Through a technology-enabled platform, Lyra connects members with evidence-based care from licensed therapists, coaches, and psychiatrists in less than a day. Services cover preventative support, clinical therapy, medication management, specialized support for more complex needs, and support for the broader family.

The Pulse: To start, could you briefly walk us through your career path and what led you to Lyra Health?

Justine Lai: When I graduated from college, I wanted to be a therapist. That led me to my first mental health job, where I was a clinical research and clinic coordinator at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. In that role, I realized I was more passionate about, and frankly better at, organizing and scaling clinical operations than providing direct care. My next role was at one of the largest social service agencies in New York where I launched and scaled business consultation programs for safety-net clinics across New York State. When I realized I was missing true business expertise to help these clinics scale sustainably, that led me to Wharton. I then spent a number of years in innovation consulting in New York and London.

I started working at Lyra Health four and a half years ago, and it has felt like the perfect combination of my earlier experiences in mental health and consulting. The first challenges at play were how to rapidly scale our therapist network operations team and how to build and launch new services. It truly felt like all the different parts of my career coming together.

The Pulse: What falls under the operations team’s purview at Lyra Health?

JL: We partner closely with our clinical leadership to bring their clinical vision to life while also balancing Lyra’s broader business goals. We actively manage the ongoing operations of our provider network, and we work closely with product and engineering teams to build and launch new features that support our providers in delivering best-in-class care.

The Pulse: As you step into the role of VP and GM of Specialty Care Solutions, which parts of the specialty mental health system are you most focused on redesigning or strengthening?

JL: Helping employers support their people where quality, affordable care is hardest to find. Right now, that’s our Neurodiversity Center of Excellence for neurodiverse children and adults, and our Pediatric Center of Excellence for kids, teens, young adults, parents and caregivers. We’ve been supporting these populations for some time, but now we are investing more deeply in dedicated care models.

The Pulse: Why is the initial focus on Neurodiversity and Pediatric Centers of Excellence? What are the needs of these populations?

JL: Employers consistently tell us these are the toughest gaps to fill. When employees or their families can’t get help, there are significant impacts for productivity and retention.

For neurodiversity specifically, it’s hard in terms of both time and cost to get an accurate initial diagnosis for conditions like Autism Spectrum Disorder or ADHD. Once there is a diagnosis, both adults and families don’t know what follow-up care to pursue. Parents also need extra coaching and support. And because there’s a genetic component to many of these conditions, parents also often discover their own needs through their child’s diagnosis.

We’re building a single platform where families get coordinated care across the entire journey – for everyone who needs it. Through our network and programs, we can also address related anxiety, depression, and attention challenges.

For kids and teens, the mental health crisis is real. Some of these challenges are more day-to-day, regarding things like screen time, stress, the rise of social media, and school pressures. Some needs are much more urgent and severe, including anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Parents tell us the care journey is overwhelming and disjointed—finding providers, sitting on waitlists, advocating for their child at school. When a child struggles, the whole family feels it, especially at work.

Our Pediatric Center of Excellence brings together specialized providers and platforms to deliver evidence-based care that grows with the child, plus support for parents and caregivers.

The Pulse: As digital health organizations push toward scalability, how do we avoid flattening care models for specialty populations whose needs don’t fit neatly into traditional benefit or care delivery structures?

JL: In my opinion, it’s about flexibility at scale. Our outpatient providers can meet a wide variety of needs, but also can hand off to a specialist when needed. Flattening happens when transitions in care are difficult. Our goal is to make discovery and connection feel seamless during these transitions. We want the coordination and back-end reporting to happen behind the scenes, so the member doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting. This vision requires deep investment in both the provider expertise and integrated care pathways.

The Pulse: There’s a lot of excitement around AI in health care, but also understandable skepticism. In specialty mental health, where do you see AI realistically supporting clinicians in care delivery over the next decade, and where should it clearly not be used?

JL: Any AI-enabled care has to be built on rigorous clinical inputs and backed by human support. We formalized this through our Polaris Principles, a blueprint for ethical AI in mental health care. There’s a real opportunity to expand access, but it has to be done right, with client safety and outcomes as the top priority. This is especially true in specialty care, where complex cases and vulnerable populations need specialized providers actively leading how care is delivered.

The Pulse: In your most recent role at Lyra Health, you helped scale operations for Lyra Care Therapy, Direct Access, SUD/AUD, and DBT programs. As you’ve scaled these therapy programs, how do you approach retaining quality as you scale?

JL: Clinical quality is our north star. We have rigorous standards for recruiting and vetting our providers, so anyone in our network can deliver high-quality, evidence-based care. We invest heavily in training, free continuing education, and consultation support. We’ve also built a robust clinical quality infrastructure that we use to actively monitor key quality metrics, helping our clinical team manage quality both proactively and reactively.

The Pulse: How do you build strong connections between offerings so that the member experience is seamless, including escalations and transfers?

JL: We support our providers in referring to and communicating with one another to help coordinate care. This happens formally through our platform and informally through the dedicated spaces we provide. For our pediatric and higher-acuity programs, multidisciplinary teams meet regularly to coordinate and plan care. Members can also see their care options in one place on our platform.

The Pulse: Looking ahead to 2030, what do you believe would have the biggest impact on improving mental health care?

JL: Companies that prove their outcomes with real data and show they’re reducing costs will thrive. If you’re evaluating a partner or employer, dig into their research and methodology and see if they can back up their claims about quality. I also think that AI has huge potential to expand quality and access, but it needs the right safeguards.

The Pulse: As innovation accelerates, what capabilities do leaders, clinicians, and operators in behavioral health organizations need to build now to ensure mental health systems are not just more digital, but more empathetic, resilient, and equitable by 2030?

JL: I spoke earlier about our Polaris Principles. While AI-focused, they apply to innovation more broadly. In mental health care, we’re supporting people at their most vulnerable. Safety is critical. All innovation needs rigor and strong guardrails—from grounding AI in evidence-based inputs and active monitoring to leveraging human expertise for development, monitoring, and escalation.

This ensures innovation is designed for long-term resiliency and impact. We also strongly believe that human providers are critical throughout the entire care journey, so maintaining them as the foundation of any care delivery system—and truly listening to their voices and perspectives—is key. That also means having strong clinical leadership on the team from the very start and at the very top.

We also need to think globally about culture, responsible care, and ethics. That includes using culturally diverse data sets and designing for a wide range of accessibility needs, so that we can meet people where they are and deliver care that will work for them.

Lastly, this is underpinned by being science-driven—leveraging research principles, studies, and data linked to high-quality outcomes.

When I step back, it ultimately is about listening deeply to our clients and their needs. That’s why many of us are in this industry: for the clients and the impact we can have on their lives. Listening in a thoughtful way leads to more empathetic, resilient, and equitable healthcare systems. It’s so important to intentionally embed this mindset into how we do our work.

The Pulse: We like to end our interviews with a rapid fire round. What’s one book you recommend that influenced how you work or think?

JL: Scaling People like Claire Hughes Johnson. She’s a seasoned tech leader who helped scale teams at Google and Stripe, and it’s a very practical book on people and team management best practices.

The Pulse: Favorite quote or motto?

JL: Not all who wander are lost. My career is windy on paper, but I’ve enjoyed that journey and what I’ve learned on every twist and turn.

The Pulse: If you could have dinner with any innovator in tech or healthcare, who would it be?

JL: Deb Liu, formerly CEO of Ancestry.com. Through her Substack, she shares meaningful perspectives on balancing success at work with life with kids and family. As a mom with a toddler, that resonates. Someone in a similar vein that I’ve actually had the pleasure of having dinner with is Nikhyl Singhal, a former entrepreneur and leader at Google and Meta. He runs The Skip Podcast and Substack as well as The Skip Community. What I appreciate about both of their careers is how they combine success in the industry with a strong commitment to supporting the next generation of leaders—helping people think through how to make both their work lives and personal lives more meaningful. That’s something I aspire to as well.