A quiet counseling room at night, two armchairs facing each other

Behavioral Health & Addiction Treatment

An admission here is rarely a single decision. It is a family in crisis at 2am, a VOB call, an authorization, a clinical assessment, often across days. Most programs cannot see where that journey breaks. I design the system that connects demand to admission and coach your team to run it.

The signature failure

Watch the admission leak, stage by stage.

Inquiry-to-admission funnel

stall @ VOB gate

A long, fragile journey, and one step where it silently dies.

Most programs can see spend and census but not the path between them. The verification-and-authorization gate is where high-intent families go cold with no one owning the clock.

  • Inquiry lands100%

    The 2am crisis call, the form, the referral

  • −28% lost
    Reached a person72%

    After-hours calls hit voicemail; families move on

  • −28% lost
    VOB + authorizationstall44%

    Ready-to-admit patients cool while the request waits

  • −15% lost
    Clinical assessment29%

    Scheduled and screened for level of care

  • −11% lost
    Admitted18%

    A bed filled, or lost for good

Illustrative decay of a typical behavioral-health inquiry-to-admission journey, not a specific engagement. The shape, and the VOB stall inside it, is what I make visible and close.

The shape of the problem

A long, fragile path from inquiry to admission.

When the highest-intent families search, and when most intake lines go to voicemail
2am
How long the path from first inquiry to admission often takes, with families lost at every gap
Days
Verification and authorization: the step that silently kills ready-to-admit leads when nobody owns the clock
VOB
What an empty bed earns tomorrow. Capacity lost today cannot be recovered.
$0

What is broken

Spend visibility without journey visibility.

How it runs nowWhat I design
Marketing reports clicks and cost-per-lead; clinical reports census. Nobody owns the path between them.
A single funnel from inquiry to admission: every stage owned, measured, and visible to leadership.
After-hours and weekend inquiries hit voicemail; high-intent families call the next program on the list.
Always-on capture: AI voice and chat that qualify, answer, and route the moment the inquiry lands.
VOB and authorization happen in a side process with no SLA; ready patients stall and go cold.
Intake-to-admission workflows with clear handoffs, timers, and accountability for every stalled case.
Attribution stops at the form fill, so spend chases leads instead of admissions.
Closed-loop attribution to admitted patients, ASAM level of care, and payer mix. Budget follows the patients who actually arrive.

How I help

An engine tuned for high-consideration care.

1

Demand and intake alignment

I connect paid and organic demand to intake capacity and level of care so you are not buying leads your team cannot answer, and not leaving beds empty at the levels where you have census to fill.

2

Lead-to-admission visibility

One funnel, one source of truth, from first inquiry through VOB, clinical assessment, and admission, wired into the EHR your team already runs (KIPU, Alleva, or Sunwave), so leadership can see exactly where patients are lost.

3

Always-on capture

AI voice and chat that triage and qualify around the clock, so the 2am inquiry gets a response instead of a voicemail, and the referent or alumnus who calls back reaches a person, not a phone tree.

4

Multi-program operating consistency

Standards, dashboards, and playbooks that hold across locations and levels of care (detox, residential, PHP, IOP) without erasing the local clinical judgment that matters.

Behavioral Health & Addiction Treatment stack diagnostic

4 failure points

  • Call tracking

    Paid numbers and the CRM log calls separately, so the same lead appears twice and attribution never reconciles.

  • Intake CRM

    Lead records carry no owner and no response timestamp; no one can prove who touched a case or how fast.

  • VOB desk

    Benefit verification runs in an email thread with no clock; ready-to-admit patients cool while the request waits.

  • Consent

    HIPAA consent is captured on paper at admission and re-keyed later, so the digital record trails the clinical one.

I work on growth, technology, and operating systems, not clinical, legal, or regulatory advice. Behavioral health acquisition is regulated territory (LegitScript certification, state marketing statutes, the TCPA), and I design capture and attribution to run inside those lines and to respect the sensitivity of the data and the families behind it.

Components that fix this

The engine parts I build for this vertical.

Each failure above maps to a component of the growth engine. Here is what plugs in where.

Related work

How an AI voice system flipped after-hours inquiry-to-admission from 18% to 64% at a 14-facility network.

Read the case study →

See where your admissions are leaking and what it is costing you.

Fill out the intake form and I will map the journey from inquiry to admission, put a number on the leaks, and show you exactly what I would design to close them.

Fill out the intake form