TripTally: An Open-Access Calculator of Labor Costs Across Psychedelic Therapy Delivery Models

Abstract

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is generating substantial clinical interest, yet despite growing economic scrutiny, a practical question has received surprisingly little attention: how do specific delivery decisions drive cost? Labor costs—typically the dominant cost component of psychedelic therapy delivery—depend on a tangle of interacting design choices: the number, length, and staffing of treatment sessions (including provider qualifications, group versus individual format, and medical backup requirements), and local hourly wage rates. Together, these factors can produce order-of-magnitude differences in per-patient cost that resist easy estimation and are rarely modeled explicitly, making rational planning difficult. As psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy moves from clinical trials and state-licensed programs toward anticipated Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, each stage bringing distinct staffing, regulatory, and reimbursement conditions, the need for flexible cost modeling is clear. To make these trade-offs visible and tractable, we developed TripTally (https://danieldickison.github.io/pat-calculator/), an open-access web calculator that, unlike existing economic analyses of fixed scenarios, allows any researcher, clinician, or policymaker to estimate labor costs using staffing configurations and wage rates specific to their own context.