ieso Welcomes Joe Raiker, PhD as Director of Clinical Strategy

Meet Joe Raiker, PhD, ieso’s new Director of Clinical Strategy!

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Joe is a clinical psychologist whose career has followed mental health from the classroom to the market. He spent nearly a decade as a professor at Florida International University before bringing his clinical lens and research rigor to industry with the hope of addressing the significant gaps he saw in healthcare by integrating apps, AI, and other emerging technologies. In health tech, he started as a behavioral scientist at Twill (later acquired by DarioHealth), then led clinical and scientific strategy at Joon, a Y Combinator-backed company addressing the needs of children and families. Most recently, prior to joining ieso, he held medical affairs, regulatory, quality, and clinical science roles at Otsuka Precision Health where he worked across research, product, and commercial teams.

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Throughout his journey, Joe became fluent in a language most clinicians never learn: the regulatory pathways and commercial realities that decide which digital health tools reach patients. He’s also openly bullish on what AI can do for behavioral health, as long as it’s built to earn a clinician’s trust and keep patients safe.

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We wanted to know how he thinks. So, we asked.

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You’ve worked in academia, pharma, and venture-backed startups. What did each one teach you, and why was ieso the next move?

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Each experience taught me something different about what it takes to bring effective healthcare solutions to patients. Academia grounded me in clinical practice and the importance of designing research studies with the appropriate rigor to ensure the results stand up to scrutiny and deliver benefits safely. Startups taught me how to answer the most pressing clinical and research questions, as well as what it takes to build products that people actually want to use. And my experience in pharma revealed what it takes to bring a rigorously tested product into the healthcare marketplace.

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What drew me to ieso was the opportunity to bring those lessons together. ieso has spent years grappling with similar headwinds I experienced across each of these settings, but is uniquely positioned to scale access to high-quality, AI-enabled solutions built on years of clinical rigor and the delivery of evidence-based interventions. Specifically, a focus on whole-person health, seamless integration into existing care workflows, and responsible AI use puts the company on the cutting edge of closing critical gaps care teams face in behavioral health.

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Clinical psychologists are trained to notice what patients leave unsaid. What does that training help you see in AI tools that a technologist might miss?

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This is such a timely question. Currently, the AI space in healthcare tends to focus on what AI does rather than what it sometimes fails to do. The latter can be just as important as the former.

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A perfect example: the sycophantic behavior that became a focus in the early days of generative AI. The working assumption seemed to be that if AI tells people what they want to hear and keeps them coming back, it must be helping them. But as clinicians, we know that’s not always true. Some of the most beneficial things in healthcare are uncomfortable or difficult for people to do, whether it's getting a shot or pushing through difficult physical therapy exercises.

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The same is true in mental health. While counter-intuitive to many, sometimes what people need most is to be gently pushed outside their comfort zones. An AI tool that encourages someone to confront a difficult thought or try something challenging may be exactly what they need to reduce our sadness or improve feelings of anxiety. We know this based on years of research evidence supporting interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). These interventions help people develop and practice skills that may feel uncomfortable or difficult at first, but ultimately deliver tangible, real-world benefits.

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You’ve worked through FDA clearance, enforcement discretion, and prescription digital therapeutics. If a founder building AI for mental health called you tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d tell them?

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One of the most challenging things we're facing right now in mental health is how quickly things are changing. But, historically, healthcare has moved slowly. Estimates suggest it takes 17 years for a validated intervention to make its way into routine clinical practice! Advances in AI have the potential to dramatically shorten that timeframe, but we have to remember that healthcare's deliberate pace is a feature, not a bug. It’s intended to make sure that the treatments patients get really do work and, just as importantly, that the benefits outweigh the risks.

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My advice to founders? Start by listening. Talk to clinicians, researchers, and healthcare administrators. Fully understand the challenges they face, how they’re trying to expedite getting the best interventions to patients, and how they’re thinking about incorporating AI into existing workflows.

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The healthcare ecosystem is complex enough without adding another layer of technology that doesn't fit. The real opportunity is to build AI solutions that slot seamlessly into it to shorten this gap and be a value add to providers and patients.

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You’re bullish on AI in behavioral health. What’s the strongest argument against it . . . and why hasn’t it changed your mind?

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The biggest concern I hear from clinicians is risk. AI is still relatively new in behavioral health, and so there's a lot of uncertainty about using something so novel with patients. This concern extends well beyond just, What are the risks if something bad happens to a patient? There are also legitimate concerns related to business reputation, liability, and compliance.

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We can’t ignore this reality. Collectively, this all compounds for already overburdened providers, and weighing these various risks makes the “should I” or “shouldn’t I” question to adopt AI even more complicated. As a result, many decide to avoid adopting AI altogether.

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But here's the other side of that argument: Your patients are already using AI, whether you adopt it or not. And when you avoid being involved in the use of these tools, some of the risks to your patients (and to you!) may even be greater.

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Rather than avoiding AI entirely, I think we clinicians have an opportunity to engage our patients in open, transparent conversations about how they're using it. We can help educate them on its potential benefits and limitations and guide them toward tools that have been rigorously evaluated for safety and high clinical quality. This approach can be a win-win: resulting in improved support for patients while also reducing your workload as a provider.

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If AI can flag that someone is about to drop out of care, whose job is it to act? What happens when no one does?

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I think this is one of the most exciting things AI can offer. For decades, getting the right treatment to a particular patient has largely been an exercise of trial-and-error for most mental health problems. Further, getting a treatment to a patient has always been conditioned on them physically showing up to a provider’s office and following through with their recommendations.

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Drop-offs in care not only predict significantly worse outcomes for patients, but they also result in lost revenue and increased costs associated with sustaining active caseloads for providers and health systems. Today, given advances in data collection, analysis, and generation of actionable insights, providers now have the ability to identify the factors that place patients at risk of dropping out of care. This allows them to intervene sooner, potentially improving the overall care experience and treatment outcomes, eliminating barriers for patients, and avoiding losses in revenue.

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Time for your intake assessment. Usual coffee order, go-to karaoke song, favorite movie, last show you binge-watched?

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Coffee order: black, no room.  

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Go-to karaoke jam is “Lose Yourself” by Eminem (shout-out to B-Rabbit!).  

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Favorite movie is Mean Girls. I want to make a t-shirt that says: “On Wednesdays, we wear pink. On Thursdays, we practice CBT.”

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As for shows, I’m not a huge binge watcher unless it’s a REALLY great show. I have the opposite tendency to watch multiple shows at once, and I switch between them depending on how I’m feeling. Right now, my slate includes: War, Nobody Wants This, Ted Lasso, Below Deck, and The Morning Show. (Well, that is until the next true crime HBO or Netflix documentary drops! Then I’m SAT. 💁)

A clinical psychologist who knows his way around FDA regulations, AI innovation, and the lyrics to “Lose Yourself”? That's fetch.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn and say hello! 👋