Network Effects That Prioritize Quality Over Quantity: Key Insights and Lessons with Brad Kittredge, CEO of Brightside Health
While most digital health companies chase volume, Brightside Health is focused on something deeper: outcomes. In the fragmented behavioral health market—where poor access and opaque standards have led to widespread underperformance—Brightside is setting a new standard. Its platform combines clinical rigor, personalized care pathways, and structured data collection to deliver measurably better outcomes at scale.
At its core, Brightside is building a network effect flywheel driven by clinical quality, not just user acquisition. As the platform gathers more structured patient data, it refines treatment recommendations, improves outcomes, and strengthens its negotiating power with payers—further growing the network.
“The most powerful network effect for a company like us is patient flow. You can earn this with a larger number of providers. But you can also earn it with quality, with a value proposition that solves a real healthcare problem and a specific use case.”
In this insightful interview, Brad Kittredge explains why quality is the most underrated network effect in healthcare and how platforms like Brightside can scale trust, not just transactions.
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Insights with Brad Kittredge, CEO and Founder of Brightside Health
Behavioral health’s access problem is a symptom of a quality problem.
“Access is a symptom of quality. We have a provider shortage because payers have kept rates low. And payers have kept rates low because they've had no clear ROI to invest because the standard of care has been opaque in behavioral health. Brightside Health was built to deliver measurably better outcomes at scale.”
For Brightside Health, network effects are not merely about amassing the greatest number of patients and clinicians, but rather quality: the key to the most powerful network effects.
“Network effects are a good business model. Many companies like ours are using them now. They've had good growth and it's working in ways. What's missing is that this model assumes care is a commodity. The incentive is not quality, it’s volume. It's explicitly lacking quality.
The goal is to get more providers, get more negotiating leverage with payers, get better rates, and then your better rates help you get more providers, and that loop will just keep going.
But I don't think quantity is enough. You need both scale and quality to differentiate and grow.”
“The most powerful network effect for a company like us is patient flow. You can earn this with a larger number of providers. But you can also earn it with quality, with a value proposition that solves a real healthcare problem and a specific use case.”
Brightside’s clinical data, quality and outcomes propel a flywheel that drives growth.
“We gather extensive data from every patient in a structured way. This allows us to analyze, identify, subtype, and recommend evidence-based treatment pathways to providers at the point of prescribing. This gets the patient on the right medication faster, and leads to better adherence and outcomes.
For example, we can better predict whether someone's going to respond to their current course of treatment as we have tons of data about past patients and how they responded.
The ability to use this data allows us to improve our quality, boost our value proposition, strengthen our positioning, and increase our negotiating leverage with payers and health systems, which in turn drives more patient volume.
This flywheel helps us grow the network and our impact by enabling us to continually provide higher and higher quality care.”
Winner-take-all dynamics don’t play out in healthcare delivery the way they do in other industries. And this is a good thing.
“When I think of network effects in healthcare, like Surescripts for example, my mental model is more like Visa and MasterCard.
These models generally lead to winner-take-all situations, where everybody has to work on a single, common platform for the exchange to work. I don't think healthcare delivery necessarily follows the same model.
I think we have a diversity of providers serving different patient populations and sub segments of the market. This will allow for greater specialization, meeting a broader range of needs, and ultimately providing higher quality care.
For me, the challenge with the traditional view of network effects is that it’s largely focused on aggregating capacity, adding as many users to the network as possible, and without much focus on quality. Quality is what will bolster the value proposition and lead to true benefits for patients.”
