A Letter from the Founding Team of Salma Health

Today, we introduce Salma Health.

Salma Health is a new model for brain healthcare. We are building an integrated system that brings together a multidisciplinary team across psychiatry, neurology and psychology into one coordinated experience, enabling patients to receive comprehensive, personalized care in one place. We’re working to deliver the right treatment to the right patient at the right time.

Why Salma Health? 

Each of us has stood beside someone we love as they struggled to get help. We’ve made the phone calls that go unreturned, scheduled the appointments that take months to access, faced misdiagnoses or delayed diagnoses that keep people in the wrong care, and tried medications that don’t work, starting the exhausting cycle over again. We’ve experienced the helplessness of not knowing where to turn, and the quiet devastation of watching someone you care about fall through the cracks of a system that wasn’t designed to catch them.

That experience never leaves you. For us, it became a call to action. 

Through our work in medicine, neuroscience, technology and healthcare investment, we saw the same pattern, reinforcing what we felt personally. The science of brain health has advanced enormously. Evidence-based treatments exist that can provide rapid, meaningful relief for patients who have tried everything else. And yet most patients never access them or even know they exist. Care is fragmented across specialties. Diagnoses take too long. Treatment decisions are still largely based on trial and error that extends for years while people suffer. 

We built Salma Health to change that.

Our model brings together everything a patient with a brain health condition needs, including psychiatry, neurology, psychology and interventional treatments under one roof. Care is coordinated by specialized teams. We offer the most advanced and evidence-based interventions available today, including SAINT® (Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy), esketamine, psychotherapy, intensive outpatient therapy and pharmacologic care. We’re also building the research infrastructure to bring tomorrow's breakthroughs to individuals faster. Everything we do is guided by data and centered around the individual. 

Our ambition is precision brain health. We know what the future looks like. When a patient connects with us for the first time, we match them to the right treatment based on their unique biology, history and needs, rather than guesswork based on a superficial assessment. But every individual we care for, every data point we collect and every clinical trial we run make us better at improving the life of each individual.

We are also carrying forward a legacy that matters deeply to us.

Dr. Nolan Williams was a cofounder of Salma Health and one of the most visionary minds in neuropsychiatry. As the inventor of SAINT, he created a treatment that has changed the lives of people living with treatment-resistant depression, people who had often run out of options. His belief that rigorous science and real compassion belong together shaped how we practice medicine. Our Orange County, California, clinic is named in his honor and every SAINT treatment room across our centers is dedicated to him. 

We are grateful to our partners, Mubadala Capital, ARCH Venture Partners, Lingotto Horizon and Averin Capital, who share our belief that brain health deserves the kind of serious, sustained investment.

Today, we have clinics across California in San Diego, Orange County and the San Francisco Bay Area, with virtual care available statewide. We are continuing to expand by opening new clinics and growing our virtual offerings as we work to bring precision brain healthcare to patients wherever they are.

We won't pretend this work is simple. Brain health is among the most complex spaces in medicine and we approach it with humility. We will learn and continuously improve. But we will never lose sight of what drives us: the millions of people and their loved ones who deserve better. 

Thank you for trusting us with your brain health and with the responsibility of getting it right. We’re honored to be building the new standard of care alongside the entire Salma Health team. 

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With gratitude,

Alaa Halawa, Ayman AlAbdallah, Brandon Bentzley, Emily Phillips-Bru and Zeena Ojjeh
The Founding Team, Salma Health