TalkDoc Inc, built a platform that allows people with a few different Medicaid health insurance plans to connect with psychiatrists that take their insurance. In this blog post, I’ll be covering in detail the early history of TalkDoc, before the company was incorporated.

TalkDoc emerged from the efforts of Dr. Janak Sachdev and Dr. Neelam Sachdev, my parents who are also psychiatrists, who were interested in providing care for people with Medicaid health insurance in Merced county in 2016. They talked to CCAH, the Medicaid health insurance plan that covers Merced county, and setup an onsite clinic in Merced city. I (Rishi Sachdev), helped in that time with basic IT work.

As far as I can remember , we had a hybrid care model even in 2016, where we did some of our appointments in person, and some of them over video (Zoom). As my parents are mostly retired and in their 70s, and Merced is more than 2 hours from where we live, it was impractical to provide an entirely on-site practice in Merced.

In 2018, we began discussions with different health plans such as San Francisco Health, and expanded our care to San Francisco.

I began pitching TalkDoc as a company in 2018, even before it was officially incorporated to investors.

The original idea for TalkDoc was to provide holistic healthcare, with an initial focus on mental healthcare. This meant offering free gym memberships for example, and tracking health outcomes, as well as offering mental healthcare. I also had some ideas about using AI and ML to help track depression passively, which was an interesting and emerging field of study at the time.

As of today, in December 2025, we have yet to offer free gym memberships, though we did provide holistic healthcare that focuses on healthy eating, and exercise, through our practitioners. In the past year we started building out some of the AI/ML direction though TalkDoc is very early in its development of AI/ML. Unfortunately, fundraising for TalkDoc proved to be very difficult, with most investors not seeing what was unique about a mental health service that focused on Medicaid. We were compared to companies such as LifeStance Health, and other psychiatry focused Telehealth companies that focused on Medicaid.

In 2018, we built a simple landing page, that directed people to contact us to set up an appointment. This was designed and built by Chris DiSanto, a friend of mine, using SquareSpace. Armen Suny, another friend of mine, contributed to some of the copy of that initial website.

This is by no means a complete history of pre-incorporation TalkDoc, but it does give a general overview of some of the details.