This May, Cara McNulty posted on LinkedIn that she was stepping down as president of behavioral health and mental well-being at CVS Health (NYSE: CVS). She wrote warmly of her five-year tenure at CVS, calling it the “experience and honor of a lifetime” while praising company CEO Karen Lynch as “a leader of leaders.”

But McNulty did not say what was next. The answer would come two months later, when Vibrant Emotional Health, a mental health services nonprofit based in New York City, named her company CEO, replacing Kimberly Williams.

This is the first CEO position in McNulty’s high-profile career, which includes leadership posts at publicly traded corporations like CVS and Target. McNulty has also played key roles in launching initiatives at the state of Minnesota’s Department of Public Health.

After over five years at CVS, McNulty’s goal at Vibrant is, “Democratizing access to mental health care,” she said in an interview with Behavioral Health Business.

“Not many people go through the mental health care system and say, ‘Gosh, that was the greatest experience I’ve ever had,’” McNulty said. “But that’s where we need to strive to get to.”

At Vibrant, McNulty may have the resources to test her ambitions.

A 55-year-old organization known until 2018 as the Mental Health Association of New York City, Vibrant received a series of pandemic and post-pandemic era grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to operate suicide prevention and crisis care services.

According to the nonprofit’s fiscal-year 2023 report, of the $331 million in operating revenues, $266 million, or 80%, are courtesy of federal grants. The organization’s operating revenue leaped 174% compared to 2022, due to the influx of federal monies.

The lion’s share of these grants are earmarked to operate the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s 988 dialing code, which went live in 2022. This includes paying for the technology, personnel and infrastructure to run over 200 crisis centers across the U.S. that handle and follow-up on calls.

“With 988, there have been 10 million calls in the last two years,” said McNulty. “We are supporting people who are in crisis, and getting those people care.”

It was at CVS that McNulty headed a suicide prevention initiative that sifted through records of the company’s Aetna-insured patients to understand what may lead to suicide, and then improve outreach to those at risk.

“People who have suicide ideation and suicide attempts, there are about 20 to 25 indicators prior to them attempting to self harm,” she said. “We decided to figure out how to flag those indicators in our data.”

The program was launched in 2020, and McNulty claimed that in its first year, “It reduced suicide attempts in our adult population almost 17% percent.”

At Vibrant, McNulty seeks to apply her skill at quickly reading and reacting to patient data. An early priority is to “continue to stabilize the clinical infrastructure and the technology that supports the back end of our crisis care lines.”

In addition to suicide prevention, Vibrant has care lines to address specific populations, such as veterans and those in need of treatment for a gambling issue. McNulty noted Vibrant’s use of geolocation routing to match patients with nearby resources as a way the company is using tech.

Along with crisis hotlines, Vibrant operates about 20 community programs tailored to specific populations, McNulty said. Many of these are funded through New York City government grants. For instance, Vibrant runs a program based in the Bronx for adults over 50 years old with serious mental health disorders.

McNulty would like to add more of these programs.

“We can replicate those programs in other communities to meet the needs of diverse populations,” she said. McNulty cited people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, or patients enrolled in Medicaid, as examples of populations her tenure would focus upon.

In leading a sprawling operation like Vibrant Health, McNulty stressed that she will apply lessons taught by her boss at CVS, Lynch.

Lynch focused on simplifying behavioral health care as much as possible by treating patients, insurers and providers as partners with more in common than not, McNulty said.

Her ex-boss also made mental health care a forefront of CVS.

“Karen is fierce and will not settle for less than stellar when it comes to mental health support and how we’re measuring outcomes,” McNulty said.

In general, McNulty wants to see more outcomes metrics in mental health.

“If you need to have your knee replaced, there are key measures that are common, whether you have that done in Minnesota or Nebraska,” she said. “You don’t have those common measures when it comes to mental health.”

Above all, the mental health system must be made easier for patients.

“When people aren’t at their best or suffering, that’s when their resiliency is at lowest,” she said. “We have to make the experience as simplified as possible.”

In part, it’s this vision for behavioral health that made McNulty the clear choice to serve as Vibrant’s next CEO, according to Jennifer Ashley, the board chair for the organization.

“From the moment we met Cara, we were fairly confident she would be Vibrant’s next leader,” Ashley said in the hiring announcement. “As we learned more about her passion for our mission, the depth of her prior experiences, which encompass all areas of mental well-being, and her ‘people first’ leadership style, we became certain she was the ideal choice to guide Vibrant forward.”