CEO Geoffrey Boyce brings telepsychiatry to those who need assistance

Geoffrey Boyce was an all-around athlete at Dacula High School.  A wing on the basketball team, he also played tennis, ran track, and played some football. When his high school years were done, he was awarded a scholarship to Furman University.

But he didn’t go to Greenville, S.C., to play for the Paladins. While a fierce competitor on the field, Boyce was an all-star in the classroom, and as Dacula’s valedictorian (and student body president), he earned an academic scholarship to the oldest private institution of higher learning in South Carolina. He majored in English, studied Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, and graduated with a rare skill that serves him well to this day: writing clearly.

“(My English degree) allowed me to map the conceptual to the practical,” he says. “When I read, hear, see, or envision big and powerful concepts, I naturally break them down into their various parts and the steps leading up to them.”

InSight + Regroup CEO Geoffrey Boyce (MBA ’07) brings telepsychiatry services to those who urgently need assistance for mental distress

As CEO and co-founder of InSight + Regroup, the top telepsychiatry service provider in the U.S., Boyce’s ability to explain complex topics in understandable language is crucial in telling his groundbreaking and life-saving story.

The privately held, private equity-backed InSight + Regroup is experiencing exponential growth at the intersection of significant advancements in both telehealth and behavioral health.

The pandemic forced Americans to become so isolated and fearful that many desperately need help for mental distress. Telemedicine is often the only game in town. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that American adults reported “considerably elevated adverse mental health conditions associated with COVID-19.” Anxiety and depressive disorders increased, along with substance abuse and suicidal ideation. 

In telepsychiatry, clinicians meet online with their clients for sessions that traditionally were in-person within offices. Many therapists thought online meetings were a stopgap measure during the pandemic. Surprisingly, many doctors and patients alike prefer the more relaxed computer sessions and want to keep doing it, even after the threat of COVID-19 diminishes.

“We are finding that many clinicians prefer telehealth for the same reasons as their patients — convenience and savings,” Boyce says. Clinicians can work at home. Plus, they avoid exposures in clinics, hospitals, and jails.

Boyce prepared his company with a November 2019 merger that now seems prescient: he brought together his InSight Telepsychiatry with Regroup Telehealth of Chicago. The combined company, with 130 administrative employees and about 600 clinicians, will roll out a new corporate name in early 2021.

Boyce used every piece of past experiences to create the company he runs today. After graduating from Furman, he worked as a paralegal and helped to grow his brothers’ Boyce Design & Contracting, a Bulldog 100-named company in Dacula run by younger brothers Thomas (BBA ’07) and John Robert (BBA ’08). It was during this time he enrolled as a Terry MBA student with a concentration in entrepreneurship.

“I quickly realized how much I preferred the collaboration of business over law and focused on entrepreneurship and my Terry MBA,” Boyce says.

Boyce has a knack for communing with great visionary minds

As with the Bard of Avon, Boyce has a knack for communing with great visionary minds. While at Terry, he joined the 2007 field trip to visit the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett.

“I’ve kept a photo of me with Buffett in my office along with four pages of notes that I wrote to myself after that experience,” he says. “Some of the highlights that continue to resonate with me are the ideas of ‘Focusing on what is knowable AND important’ and basing big decisions on an understanding of the absolute fundamentals. Being able to filter through the noise, the details, and everyone’s various opinions on a matter to rationally distill a problem or an opportunity down to its core is a skill that I feel very fortunate to have.”

That skill quickly rocketed him into a chief executive’s chair when he connected with yet another visionary, Dr. James R. Varrell, the first psychiatrist in America to order a commitment via video and a pioneer in using telepsychiatry to increase access to care. Boyce joined Varrell’s CFG Health Network because health care was a perfect fit for his interest in entrepreneurship and “building something that mattered in a market where there was a real opportunity to do something good.”

Together they created InSight Telepsychiatry in 2009 with Boyce as CEO and Varrell as chief medical officer, positions they still hold.

“I was immediately impressed with Geoffrey’s business savvy and ideas for taking our telepsychiatry services to scale,” Varrell says. “I wondered if he was too young (then 27) to be taking this on, but we decided to try. Geoffrey’s ability to think into the future and then build the processes and teams necessary to get there is one of his greatest assets. He is the ideal leader for making sure this newly merged organization can define the industry moving forward.”

It is helping in ways people never thought possible

“It’s amazing that our free clinic in rural Virginia can provide vulnerable patients access to a Harvard-trained, Spanish-speaking psychiatrist on the other side of the country in California,” says Shannon Raybuck, a mental health coordinator for Fauquier Free Clinic, a partner clinic with Spanish-speaking clients.

Free clinics bill through Medicaid, established doctors bill through their clinics and insurance groups, and Boyce’s company earns fees and expenses.

While many of InSight + Regroup’s services are delivered by providers to patients in community-based hospitals and clinics, the company also created its Inpathy division to enable individuals to access care directly in their homes via a fully virtualized clinic model. Inpathy’s blog also publishes essays on such subjects as social media’s enormous impact on mental health.

“Delivering care directly to patients in their homes gives me a glimpse inside their private worlds without being overly intrusive,” says Dr. Alicia Azpiri of Medford, Mass.

Boyce’s rapid rise was not unexpected as one of six children from a remarkable family. His attorney father, Peter, defends police officers. Mother Carole has been a member of the Gwinnett County School Board since 2005. Boyce’s sister, Olivia, is vice president of marketing and communications for InSight + Regroup. Brother Brandon is an orthopedic surgeon, and Timothy is a partner with PwC.

As he forges ahead, he takes with him the lessons he learned from so many. Boyce, a visionary in a flourishing field, has grand plans for his company’s future.

“We want to build the nation’s largest behavioral health care practice that distributes care resources where they are needed most,” he says. “We want to keep innovating to make the delivery of behavioral health more efficient and to integrate it into our overall health care system seamlessly.”