Welcoming Dr. David Grodberg as Brightline’s Chief Medical Officer

I am thrilled to be the Chief Medical Officer at Brightline. The shift from academic medicine to innovative digital health startup is incredibly exciting and is a natural next step in my career.

After completing my fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center I opened a private practice in New York’s Upper Eastside. The vast majority of my patients were children with ADHD, disruptive behaviors, anxiety, depression and autism spectrum disorder. Their diagnosis had often been delayed and prior management haphazard leading to severe symptoms and an acute demand for pharmacologic intervention. As the healthcare system had few resources for behavioral based interventions, I found myself running a psychopharmacology practice rather than providing the holistic family centered care I knew they needed.

Motivated to change the model of care delivery, after five years in private practice, I returned to academic medicine and began an NIH funded research fellowship at the Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Over the past 15 years I’ve received federal and foundation grants that supported my work to address the many barriers to pediatric mental health treatment. As a KL2 National Research Service Award recipient, I developed the Autism Mental Status Exam (AMSE), which is an easy to use diagnostic tool that helps primary care clinicians assess and diagnose children with autism spectrum disorder. I was able to validate this tool and show that it performed as well as the complex, labor intensive and costly standard diagnostic tests. The AMSE is now translated into many languages and used around the world.

In 2015 I returned to the Yale Child Study Center as the Medical Director for the outpatient service. Since then I founded MindNest Health, a company whose mission is to empower parents to meet their children’s mental health needs. This type of parent engagement, called Parent Mediated Interventions, equips parents with the skills to work with their children consistently and at home. I collaborated with colleagues in psychology and pediatrics to develop web-based education modules for the most common pediatric behavioral health problems.

I am delighted to now bring my experience to Brightline where we take the science-based interventions that we use every day at academic centers and use technology and innovative care delivery models to break down the barriers. This new approach allows parents to engage in their child’s care long before and after their child’s appointment in a way that does not currently exist. The team shares a common passion to truly improve our healthcare system and the lives of children and their families. I am so honored to lead our clinical team as we strive to help children and their families develop to their fullest potential.