This is an exclusive BHB+ story
Nonprofit behavioral health provider Centerstone has elevated its chief financial officer to the role of chief operating officer.
New COO Carol Bean is planning to be “bold” to accelerate Centerstone’s growth and seeks to double the company’s revenue. Specifically, she aims to spur the company’s certified community behavioral health clinic (CCBHC) strategy, alongside other goals.
Bean is also preparing to cope with what she anticipates will be an increasingly difficult workforce landscape and more competitive behavioral health industry. To compete with the swath of PE-backed providers, Centerstone plans to make key investments, including an artificial intelligence (AI) strategy.
The COO has worked at Centerstone for 11 years, starting as assistant corporate controller before working her way up to the C-suite. Before joining Centerstone, Bean worked at Deloitte and Cigna Healthcare.
Addiction Treatment Business sat down with Bean to discuss her three priorities for her first year as COO, how Centerstone stays competitive in an increasingly crowded industry and the company’s AI strategy.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ATB: What are your top three priorities for your first year as COO?
Bean: My first three priorities will definitely include supporting our business plan. We recently revamped our strategic plan, and what our four imperatives are for the organization, to really be our North Star as we decide on and be intentional about the opportunities that we’re going to invest in.
Second, it would have to be our investment in technology, in regards to AI. We’re vetting more AI software, getting those implemented. We’re working with a couple of organizations now, and we’re implementing some tools to help with training of new staff, and also training for our current staff, as well as making work easier for our commission. This includes helping with documentation. Hopefully it will reduce burnout and add some more work-life balance for those folks, as well as retention and recruiting of our staff.
The third opportunity that we have is that our organization just recently was awarded as demonstration sites for CCBHC – that’s the certified community behavioral health clinic reimbursement model. We just recently implemented that in our Illinois footprint in October, and we went live with that in our Indiana footprint in January. We’re definitely looking forward to seeing how we can grow this particular book of business by expanding our geographies in those areas with this, as well as figuring out how we can continue to leverage the really good reimbursement rates that we’ll get for these bundled services, and continue to make investments in those areas to help grow our client base.
What’s the timeline for growing Centerstone’s CCBHC business?
We are really at the mercy of the state, right? Indiana and Illinois recently adopted that model. We’re really hoping that other states within our geography will adopt it as well. So we know that our Florida operations may have an opportunity to bid on this type of business and be able to become a demonstration site. That’s one area that we’re truly focused on.
In every single one of our footprints, we have not had reimbursement rate increases for several decades. The CCBHC model gives us the opportunity to serve more people. As we start out with Indiana and Illinois, we’re making sure that we do it right, so that we can take that and replicate that in, for example, Florida, if it gets adopted in other areas of our footprint when that opportunity presents itself.
What is a challenge you face when seeking to grow Centerstone’s CCBHC footprint?
One of the biggest challenges that we face is being able to attract staff. It is so competitive because the reimbursement rate is so good, and one of the areas that they focus on and want you to do is to pay your staff a competitive wage. That starts to drive up the cost of labor and makes it very competitive from a recruiting standpoint to secure those staff. If you’re in Indiana, we’re one of eight clinics that were demonstration sites. So all eight are going after the same staff in that geographical area.
What’s your approach to balancing the clinical and the financial needs of the organization?
We definitely need the financial and being able to generate good margin so that we can continue to support the operations. One of the things that I’ve done in my role as the CFO is to focus on financial literacy for our organization and helping our leaders understand that everything you do in your clinic has a financial impact. If we have a high no-show rate, that affects your revenue. If we have vacant positions, it definitely costs more to back fill a position or to hire than to try to retain our staff and be able to grow our staff. So it’s teaching our clinicians about the numbers and understanding what makes up your finances, and it’s really what they do every day that’s going to impact the margins that we’re able to create.
How do you plan to leverage AI, and where do you believe AI belongs in Centerstone’s toolbox?
We’re definitely embracing AI. We don’t intend for AI to come in and replace the jobs of our clinician, but we’re really trying to leverage this technology to help make work easier for our staff and to be able to assist with things like documentation, to be able to point out things to a clinician that would help them in terms of making an accurate diagnosis. We are also working to take this information that we’re getting through AI and use that with our Research Institute to develop best practices.
We have made some really bold choices and bold decisions investing in AI to help us grow our business. With just all the staffing challenges that we have, we could AI in human resources. Being able to figure out the technology that can identify a good candidate, one that we feel would be tied to the mission, one that we feel like would be able to stay with the organization long term.
What are the most significant operational challenges facing behavioral health providers today that perhaps were not as prominent when you first joined Centerstone?
My mind just keeps going back to staffing. We continue to hear that for young adults entering into college, this is really not an area where people are enrolling in. I really get concerned about the workforce in the next five to 10 years. Will there be a scarcity of people who are wanting to be therapists or licensed clinical social workers to help us in this space?
There’s so much competition now in terms of PE-backed companies that are coming into our space who are offering telehealth services and really make it convenient. So organizations like Centerstone have to continuously figure out how to stay competitive and be competitive and step out of our box. We’re used to being in the community, face to face interaction with our clients. It’s starting to think bigger, because our competitors are thinking bigger and are figuring out how to do it in a better way.
What can we expect to see from Centerstone in the next five years?
Hopefully growth. And it’s an area that we continue to look at. Our organization has come to scale and to size just through affiliation. Hopefully we’ll see one or two affiliations within that five year timeframe to help expand our footprint and be able to create more access to care.
The goal would definitely be to at least try to double our revenue size now. We’re projected in this fiscal year to get about $ 430 million in revenue. Could be great if, you know, at the end of five years, we have doubled that.
We have some strategies in terms of doing that. We’re doing a lot of work around the service lines – being able to pull services from each of the states together under one leadership, to help grow them. We’re starting with our crisis service line, which has done really well with this model.
