For most Americans with severe OCD and Related Disorders, effective intensive treatment is hard to reach: programs are scarce, waitlists are long, and getting care has typically meant stepping away from work, school, or family for weeks, often at significant out-of-pocket cost. Many people who need this level of care never receive it.

Today NOCD, the world’s leader in serving people with OCD and Related Disorders, announced its commitment to making intensive OCD treatment available nationwide, through its OCD-specialty virtual intensive outpatient program (IOP), powered by Noto.

NOCD Intensive Outpatient Therapy extends the continuum of care that NOCD pioneered in an outpatient setting. Members attend three hours of structured treatment per day, four days per week, combining group and individual exposure and response prevention (ERP), the gold-standard treatment for OCD, delivered by OCD specialists, entirely from home. Members step up to intensive care only after a course of outpatient ERP has not been enough, and step back down as they improve, all within one clinical model and one measurement system. NOCD’s model was inspired by the work of Jamie Feusner, MD, Patrick B. McGrath, Ph.D., and Lori Johnson, M.A.

“OCD is arguably the most misunderstood acronym in the English language, and that misunderstanding has driven decades of misdiagnosis and mistreatment,” said Stephen Smith, Co-Founder and CEO of Noto and NOCD. “We built NOCD to fix that at the community and outpatient level, and we became the leader in evidence-based OCD specialty care by proving our outcomes. Higher levels of care are next. Intensive therapy for OCD and Related Disorders that used to be two states away is coming to your living room.”

Johnson notes, “Our program is designed to help Members translate treatment into real-world change. Members have opportunities to practice ERP and apply their skills in their homes, communities, and everyday lives, while receiving timely support and feedback to work through barriers as they arise. This integrated approach helps Members build momentum and make progress that extends beyond the treatment setting.”

The company has named the leadership team that will scale NOCD Intensive Outpatient Therapy nationally, combining a wide-range of clinical and operations experience in behavioral health.

  • David Cohn, General Manager of Intensive Therapy Programs at Noto, NOCD’s parent brand, leads the business unit. Cohn founded and served as CEO of Regroup, one of the nation’s first telepsychiatry companies, and built it into Array Behavioral Care, where he served as Chief Growth Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors.

  • Patrick B. McGrath, PhD, Chief Clinical Officer of NOCD, oversees the clinical model. A nationally recognized expert in OCD and anxiety disorders, Dr. McGrath previously led intensive and residential OCD treatment programs at Linden Oaks Hospital at Edward-Elmhurst as well as Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital.

  • Jamie Feusner, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Noto, guides the scientific foundation of the intensive program, including its measurement-based care approach and treatment protocols. An internationally recognized OCD researcher, Dr. Feusner is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, Senior Scientist at CAMH, and Incoming Chief of the Department of Psychiatry at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. He previously served as Director of the UCLA Adult OCD Intensive Treatment Program for 15 years.

  • Doug Nemecek, MD, Chief Psychiatric Officer of Noto, serves as a strategic advisor to the program on medical strategy and health plan alignment. Dr. Nemecek previously served as Chief Medical Officer for Behavioral Health at Evernorth.

  • Lori A. Johnson, M.A., Head of Intensive Clinical Operations, designed and built the program from its first cohort and leads the development and delivery of the program. With more than 15 years of experience across behavioral health and higher levels of care, Johnson has worked with complex and persistent mental health conditions across the continuum of care and has led the development of innovative, integrated treatment models that combine specialty clinical care, case management, and multidisciplinary support.

“OCD doesn’t schedule itself around an appointment calendar, and for some Members, beating it takes daily, structured practice with an expert in the room,” said Dr. McGrath. “For decades, getting that intensity meant putting your life on hold and going somewhere. We made the treatment more intensive instead and it can be done from the convenience of your own home. If we can do that for OCD at a national scale, we can do it for other complex, hidden, but treatable conditions too.”

Dr. Doug Nemecek shared, “Inside health plans, I saw the same case over and over: a family desperate for intensive OCD care, which meant difficulty finding an available and affordable program, and even more difficulty coordinating the transitions back and forth to ongoing routine outpatient care. These gaps have existed for decades. NOCD has now built an intensive outpatient program to close them.”

Built on the Noto platform, scaling the world’s largest OCD-specialty treatment service

The intensive program runs on Noto, the AI-enabled platform that powers NOCD and Rebound’s network of more than 1,200 primarily full-time, specialty-trained therapists delivering over 1 million evidence-based OCD therapy sessions per year. The same infrastructure that scaled specialty outpatient care nationwide now supports a higher level of care.

“Intensive care should be an integrated, clinical decision backed by data, not a marketing funnel,” said Cohn. “Every Member in this program is here because outpatient care wasn’t enough, and every Member’s progress is measured throughout treatment. Families deserve that discipline. So do our health plan partners, because the same rigor and integration that improves outcomes is what lowers the total cost of care.”

Availability

Noto Intensive Programs currently serve Members in Colorado, Montana, Michigan, and Texas, with waitlists open in six additional states and nationwide expansion underway. The program accepts private pay today, with in-network insurance coverage expanding through Noto’s existing health plan partnerships. Referrals come primarily from NOCD’s outpatient network; families and providers can inquire directly at https://www.treatmyocd.com/intensive-treatment.

Looking ahead, intensive programming extends Noto’s mission of scaling virtual specialties for complex, hidden, but treatable conditions, deepening the continuum of care available to the populations its specialties serve.

About Noto

Noto is an AI-enabled platform that’s transforming specialty therapy to end the mental health crisis. It’s a parent brand that develops and enables the operations to scale its virtual specialties for complex psychiatric and behavioral conditions: NOCD and, most recently, Rebound, with the expectation of more to come.

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