Mental health text service lands contract with UnitedHealthcare, Optum

It took eight years of late night copy writing and researching, psychological studies and lots of trial and error, but Johnny Crowder’s Cope Notes has finally gotten its big break, he says. 

The Tampa-based healthtech firm delivers daily mental health support to its users through SMS text messages — a model Crowder and his team of seven employees have bootstrapped since Cope Notes’ founding in 2018. Now, the company has entered into its first long-term insurance contract, with industry giants UnitedHealthcare and Optum, spreading Cope Notes to thousands of Medicaid recipients across Florida, Crowder says. 

Cope Notes' agreement with the insurance company is a five-year expansion signed after the conclusion of a successful one year pilot, Crowder says. Optum and UnitedHealthcare have begun offering Cope Notes to Medicaid recipients at two pivotal points of care, according to a release: as an additional support for members who agree to receive hands-on mental health assistance and as an alternative for families who declined to participate in traditional methods of mental health wraparound services and support. 

Both Crowder and UnitedHealthcare declined to disclose financial terms of the agreement.

“My original idea was that I was going to help individual people like me who might need some additional support, but now I’m seeing our partnerships reach way more people than we ever thought was capable,” Crowder says. “We’ve become really partnership focused, working with governments, public school districts, community health programs — whoever can help us take two plus two and turn it into a million by combining resources.”

On the vine

Crowder’s Cope Notes first caught the attention of UnitedHealthcare during a behavioral health conference he spoke at in 2021. He told the story of his own lifelong struggle with mental health — and his staunch resistance toward seeking professional help or talking with a licensed therapist. By the time Crowder entered college, though, he had fostered a deep interest in psychology and neuroscience — particularly the methods behind interrupting and changing thought patterns. 

The 33-year-old had grown up in the era of microcontent, he says, watching six-second Vine videos give way to TikTok and learning how to squeeze thoughts into Twitter character limits and Facebook. What if he could come up with a way to turn microcontent into a micro-intervention?

Thus Cope Notes was born — delivering clinically-reviewed texts, psychology facts, exercises, journaling prompts and more to subscribers’ cell phones randomly throughout the day. 

“My whole idea was, if people aren’t willing to take 50 minutes to have a therapy session once a week, would they be willing to take 15 seconds to read two sentences?” Crowder asks. “It was really trying to make something so bite-sized and easy to digest that people would actually use it every single day.”

At $8.99 per month, a one year subscription to Cope Notes costs less than a single therapy session, Crowder says. And the model has caught on. Since 2018, Cope Notes has delivered more than 5.5 million daily text messages to more than 46,000 people spread across 110 countries, the organization says. Crowder declined to share his company's annual revenue, but said the 2025 fiscal year was the highest Cope Notes has seen in its eight years in business.

The daily messages combine positive psychology, neuroscience and peer support that requires less than 10 seconds of daily interaction and are scientifically proven to reduce depression, anxiety, and stress while increasing emotional intelligence and coping skills. 

Easy to use

In 2023, Cope Notes and UnitedHealthcare launched a pilot program that primarily benefited teens, pregnant and new mothers, and low-income households, Crowder says — communities with acute and often neglected needs.

Results from member surveys revealed impressive outcomes, with 82% of respondents classifying Cope Notes as “helpful” or “very helpful." As part of a new five-year expansion, UnitedHealthcare and Optum will expand their partnership with Cope Notes to allow Medicaid recipients in Tampa, Lakeland, Ocala, Jacksonville, and Miami to receive Cope Notes for free, Crowder says. 

This initiative is part of a broader effort to address the growing need for easy-to-use digital mental health services, specifically in the areas of prevention and intervention. 

Cope Notes is ideal because it doesn’t require smartphones, broadband internet, or transportation to access mental health care — aligning the program with the priorities set out by the federal government’s Rural Health Transformation Program, led by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Crowder says. 

“We’re a gap-filler. I’ve always known that partnerships with insurance payers would help us fill the gaps in the continuum of care that people like me fall into every day,” Crowder says. “Our goal is to provide user-friendly and affordable mental health support to anyone who needs it, and this partnership allows us to do that on a significantly larger scale, for both youth and adults, right here in our own backyard. We’re going to save a lot of lives.”

It’s also illuminated a path for CopeNotes to pursue more partnerships in the public and private sector. Last June, Cope Notes began a partnership with the Central Florida Behavioral Network to provide mental health services for school districts in Pasco, Charlotte and DeSoto counties. Crowder says he hopes the new partnerships with UnitedHealthcare and Optum will give way to more opportunities to deliver CopeNotes to people across the globe, regardless of whether they struggle with a diagnosed mental illness or not. 

“We’re serving tens of thousands of people who just want to take good care of their brain, so we’ve kind of become like a toothbrush,” Crowder says. “A toothbrush isn’t just for people with cavities. It’s for everybody with teeth.”