Meet Playbl: A K-12 behavioral health company that combines cutting-edge research with immersive gaming to tackle critical challenges like vaping, substance misuse, and mental well-being. Playbl is a commercial spinout from the Play2PREVENT Lab, built at Yale Medical School and now based at Dartmouth College, with 16 years of NIH-funded research behind it. Its mission is simple: give youth and families the tools they need to make better choices, through interactive, evidence-based learning experiences. Today, Playbl is deployed across 27 states, selling into schools, prevention coalitions, health departments, and clinics.
Our conversation with Kirby Salerno, CEO of Playbl, explores how the company combines evidence and engagement to change youth behavior, from Tier 1 prevention in the classroom to Tier 2 restorative alternatives to suspension, and what it takes to keep every program grounded in real research as Playbl continues to grow.
What inspired you to take up your current role as CEO with Playbl and work for behavioral health for adolescents?
I’ve spent my whole career in edtech, and I was introduced through my network to Dr. Lynn Fiellin, the founder of the Play to Prevent Lab, which she started at Yale and later moved to Dartmouth. She’s a truly inspiring person, entrepreneurial even from an academic perspective, having built a lab that essentially invented game-based interventions for adolescent behavioral health. The idea behind those games is to meet young people where they are, using a highly engaging format that teaches them while they’re having fun.
Behavioral health hasn’t seen a lot of innovation, and we believe bringing that kind of innovation to youth behavioral health can create something that truly scales nationally and delivers maximum impact. So many behavioral health programs over the years have been localized, built around in-person interactions, which is valuable, and there’s an important role for that kind of intervention but our goal is to build something available in a way that’s cost-effective, technology-efficient, and can really move the needle. That mission was incredibly inspiring to me.
It’s also personal. I have three adolescent kids, and you really can’t be an adolescent without dealing with behavioral health issues in some form. As a father of three, that reality hit home for me. So it became this marriage of skill sets: I’d spent my career bringing new technology-based products to the education market, and Lynn had built these remarkable, evidence-based interventions. If we could bring the two together, we could do something truly special.
How did your prior experience in edtech shape how you’ve approached leading Playbl?
I’ve specialized in K-12 go-to-market strategy over a 20-plus year career, working for a number of different startups and seeing firsthand what works and what doesn’t. That body of knowledge has been incredibly valuable in the day-to-day work at Playbl. Every company is unique, and every product is unique, so not everything is directly transferable, but the basic framework of marketing and selling a product in K-12 has been a huge help.
I think that’s different from being a purely product-based founder. There are a lot of people in this space with an amazing idea for how to use technology to innovate in education, but no background in the industry itself. Unfortunately, they often end up spending a long time just figuring out how to go to market in K-12. I’ve had the advantage of not having to start from scratch there which doesn’t mean I don’t have plenty to learn. I’m constantly learning new things from other entrepreneurs. But having that experience already in place has helped accelerate things, because I haven’t had to go through that steep learning curve myself.
Playbl is built on years of research into adolescent behaviour. How does that research foundation make you more impactful compared to other wellness apps?
It’s an interesting question. Having that research is a tremendous advantage for us. It allows us to market these programs as evidence-based, which matters enormously in public health. We sit at the intersection of public health and education, and the public health space, even more than education, is deeply focused on evidence-based materials. If you’re a startup building a product from scratch, it takes years to reach that evidence-based standard. We have the advantage of commercializing programs that are already evidence-based, which immediately positions us strongly in the market.
In terms of how the platform itself came together, we’ve built a student and teacher facing platform over the last two years that houses these programs. That platform design wasn’t really shaped by the research itself. It came much more from understanding our customers, the realities schools and community-based organizations face when implementing these programs, and how to make that process as seamless as possible for them. That’s actually a separate track from the research behind the programs.
So the research gives our programs credibility, while our own experience working closely with early adopters, customers, and partners has shaped how the platform itself is designed.
Could you walk us through how schools use Playbl and the impact it has on students?
There are two different ways schools use our programs, depending on which program it is.
The first is Tier 1 prevention, which includes the programs originally developed at the lab founded at Yale and now based at Dartmouth. These are curricular programs, typically embedded into a health and PE curriculum as a supplemental resource for teachers covering topics like nicotine, tobacco, smoking, and vaping. The goal is for kids to play the game for at least 90 minutes, spread across multiple sessions over three to four weeks, so they build the skills to avoid engaging in the behavior in the first place.
The second is Tier 2, designed for kids who’ve already been caught engaging in a behavior, like vaping. Rather than suspending those students, schools use our programs as a restorative alternative to suspension. Over the past year, we’ve built two Tier 2 intervention programs and are currently running data analysis on them so we can publish results next year, at which point they’ll be evidence-based as well.
These Tier 2 programs are implemented in a very different setting than the curricular ones. Rather than a classroom teacher, it might be a vice principal, a school counselor, or in some cases, when a student has been referred to juvenile justice court, a court diversion specialist. The implementation looks different because the use case itself is different.
What are the benefits of the tier two alternative to suspension course compared to the out of school suspension?
The traditional approach to school discipline is to suspend students when they violate a rule, and right now, vaping is one of the biggest drivers of school suspensions. The problem is that suspending kids tends to backfire in a couple of ways. First, they’re likely to engage in the very behavior they were suspended for, just outside of school. Second, they fall behind academically, which creates a vicious cycle: kids fall behind, get stressed, engage in the behavior again, and get caught again. Research shows that the more often kids are suspended, the less likely they are to graduate high school.
Schools are starting to recognize how serious that impact is, which is why there’s a growing shift toward restorative practices, an educational approach to discipline rather than a punitive one. Instead of removing kids from school, restorative practices keep them in school and educate them about the behavior they got caught doing. That approach is more likely to reduce the behavior going forward, rather than trapping kids in that downward spiral.
This movement toward restorative practices is gaining real traction across the industry, and we’re trying to be at the forefront of it. Ultimately, instead of just judging students for their actions, we’re helping them improve.
In a field like behavioral health, impact can be hard to quantify. How do you measure whether Playbl is genuinely working for students who use it?
We think that there are two major ways to measure impact. One is a pre-post assessment, comparing what kids know before an intervention to what they know after. The other is measuring overall impact at the school level, for example, whether vaping incidents decrease over time, or whether students are less likely to get caught multiple times. Those school climate and behavior metrics are valuable, but much harder to measure because they require longitudinal data collection.
In practice, we run pre-post assessments. Every student who goes through one of our programs fills out a pre-check, around 10 to 15 questions, and then a post-check when they finish. We measure the difference and send that data back to the school or community organization, so they have evidence that kids actually learned something and shifted their attitudes and beliefs. Right now, that’s the most practical way for us to measure impact.
We’ve only been at this for about two years, but anecdotally, we’re hearing really positive feedback, from school staff implementing the programs, from the kids going through them, and from parents. Our Tier 2 programs include a parent version, and parents have responded well to being included in that education. Beyond the anecdotes, we’re also seeing statistically significant improvements in our pre-post data. That’s true for ReFresh, our Tier 2 vaping program specifically, and we’re currently writing up that dataset into a paper for publication.
As Playbl grows, what’s the one thing you’re most determined to keep true to, no matter how big it gets?
That’s actually the easiest question to answer, because it’s so clear in my mind: evidence plus engagement. That combination is our differentiator in the market, and it’s the one place where we will not compromise. Whatever we build, it has to be evidence-based, and it has to be genuinely engaging for kids.
Now, sometimes that evidence base is available right away. Other times, we start with something that’s research-based but not yet evidence-based. In those cases, we do the data collection, we publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal, and at that point, it becomes evidence-based.
So we’re committed to that path for any program we develop, or that the lab develops, over time. Every program will eventually be evidence-based, and every program will be engaging and meet youth where they are. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to, no matter how big Playbl gets.
Learn more at Playbl’s website here.