The problem with directories
Type "therapist near me" and you get a wall of names, credentials and stock smiles, with no way to compare them and no basis for choosing. Research on the therapeutic alliance says fit is one of the strongest predictors of whether Therapy works, and a directory leaves that fit entirely to chance.
We built Iris to carry that burden instead: not to pick for you, but to narrow the field until choosing feels possible.
Hard gates come first
Before any intelligence runs, non-negotiables filter the field. Every Practitioner Iris will ever show you is licence-verified against the Official Records; unverified profiles never enter the pool. Then your own constraints apply: budget, schedule, Online or In Person, and whether your Insurance or employer Benefit covers the Session. A brilliant match you cannot afford or reach helps nobody, so affordability and reach are gates, not preferences.
Then fit, weighed honestly
What survives the gates gets ranked on fit: your Language and the cultural context you want understood without translating, what you are coming in with and each Practitioner's training for it, and the practical texture of how you want Care to feel. Iris weighs these signals and shows you a shortlist, with the reasons attached, so you can see why every name is in front of you.
Where Iris stops
- She narrows. You choose. Iris presents Practitioners who fit and the reasoning behind each one. The decision is yours, and switching later takes two taps in the app.
- She never diagnoses. Matching signals inform fit, not labels. Only a qualified Practitioner can diagnose, in a Real conversation.
- She keeps your story where it belongs. What you tell Iris exists to serve you. Your Employer funding the Benefit sees aggregate utilization, never identity, never content. That separation is architecture, not policy.
A system that learns without surveilling
Every match that leads to a second Session, and every one that does not, teaches the system what fit looks like in the Real world, in aggregate, decoupled from identity. Matching accuracy improves over time without any individual's story being used against them.
Iris does the ranking and the explaining. Licensed Practitioners make every clinical decision.
