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What happened
We spent the week at the Behavioral Health Tech Conference (BHT2026), held September 22 to 24 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville.
About BHT
The conference puts health plans, employers, providers, investors, digital health companies, and government leaders in one place to work on access to mental health, substance use, autism, and intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) care.
This year brought more than 300 speakers across two and a half days.
What we heard
One session that stayed with us was "Supporting People with IDD and Co-Occurring Mental Health Disabilities" on Tuesday morning, with Brad Turner (Commissioner, Tennessee Department of Disability and Aging), Katy Neas (CEO, The Arc of the United States), and Tonya Copeland (Managing Partner, TrustHaven Advisory Group).
The panel started from a hard fact: people with intellectual disabilities often can't tell a clinician what they're struggling with emotionally. So how do you support them anyway?
Part of the answer was education: train the healthcare system on which mental health conditions commonly show up alongside IDD, so care teams know what to look for.
What we saw on the floor
We met a lot of people doing specialized, important work in mental health, including companies focused on grief, anxiety attacks, and men's mental health.
A lot of them were startups working to make care easier to reach, especially where in-person care is expensive or hard to find, like rural areas.
Why we went
Behavioral health organizations are a big part of who Paubox works with. BHT is where a lot of the people building for that community show up in person, and we wanted to hear from them directly. It was also a chance to catch up in person with customers.
The bottom line
BHT describes its community as people "using tech to help human beings who need access to behavioral health care… with the keyword being 'care.'" Thanks to the BHT team and to everyone who made time to talk with us in Nashville.
See related: Behavioral health and AI - NatCon24
Kenzie Mills with our customers from Josi Health
Kenzie Mills with another customer from Author Health
Tuesday morning on the Dolly Stage
The expo hall, guitar included
Nashville, of course, brought a fiddle
