Mental health vet Beacon Behavioral Partners is looking to expand through a strategic partnerships model with high-performing independent providers.
The diversified operator believes that bringing private practice providers into the fold can help unify different expertise and standardize care. As a growing company, Beacon offers clinician groups equity and clinical autonomy.
“It’s about enabling and fostering [clinician leaders], and connecting them off the island of private practice and into a cohort – and a partnership – with other like-minded [leaders] that kind of feeds itself,” Austen Weatherly, chief development officer at Beacon Behavioral Partners, told Behavioral Health Business. “It’s about really finding other doctors who want to share what makes their practice special, because that’s what we’re looking for with these leaders and communities who are on the front lines of the mental health crisis.”
Backed by Latticework Capital Management, the provider group has had a busy start to 2025.
Since December, Beacon Behavioral Partners has strategically acquired five companies in the Northeast and South regions of the U.S., the provider exclusively revealed to BHB.
Those acquisitions include New Jersey-based providers Synapse Integrative Behavioral Health and Shore Clinical TMS & Wellness Center. They also include Virginia- and Washington, D.C.-based provider NeuroPsych Wellness Center, along with Pennsylvania-based Cognizant Behavioral Health Services. Texas- and Louisiana-based The Maples was yet another acquisition.
This growth builds on the company’s expansion plans. In February 2024, Beacon announced nine acquisitions.
Founded nearly three decades ago, Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Beacon primarily focused on outpatient clinics early on. Later, it pivoted to inpatient care as well due to regulatory and reimbursement changes.
“I tell people all the time that we’ve had to be fluid, because flexible is too rigid,” Sean Wendell, CEO of Beacon Behavioral Partners, told BHB. “When you’re in health care, you always have to be ready to pivot. And that’s what we’ve done over the years.”
Today, the provider offers a continuum of services, including medication management and therapy. It also offers a range of services for individuals with treatment-resistant depression, including TMS therapy and ketamine. Patients can also access intermediate levels of care, including partial hospitalization (PHPs), intensive outpatient services (IOP) and more elevated levels of care, including residential.
Beacon’s approach to partnership
The provider group has grown often through acquisitions of independent practices. Beacon’s model is focused on keeping the same leadership, particularly in the clinical realm.
Beacon can take on the operational side of the business.
“We handle all those things that doctors didn’t go to school to handle, nor do they care to handle – all the billing, the admin, the credentialing, the payers, the payroll, recruiting, credentialing,” Wendell said. “If we do a good job of doing that and let the doctors just focus on what they truly are passionate about, magic happens.”
Before selling to Beacon in 2024, Dr. Joel Holiner, founder of The Holiner Group, evaluated 13 potential buyers, including various private equity firms and PE-backed providers.
He noted that many of the potential buyers had little experience in the behavioral health space.
He was looking for buyers with aligned incentives that would allow him to keep his staff. Additionally, he wanted a combination of stocks and cash, so that he could be invested in growing the business.
He had nearly abandoned the idea of selling until meeting with Beacon, which met all his criteria. Now, as a part of the larger company, he said he is able to expand his offerings with support.
“We’ve been able to have the resources from the larger company to help bring in more doctors and more therapists. … And we have resources from the other doctors in the group,” Holiner said. “For example, I didn’t do Spravato, which is a ketamine treatment for treatment-resistant depression. The coding was complicated, the billing was complicated, and I was trying to figure out how to do it. One of the doctors in our group is an expert on ketamine. He helped come in and he held my hand and said, ‘Here’s how you do it.’ He set the whole thing up. Showed me how to do the coding, showed me how to do the buying and billing, showed us everything, and we now have over 50 patients a week getting ketamine.”
The future for Beacon
Beacon now has 30 partners across 45 locations, making it a major player in the behavioral health arena.
And it could be a ripe time to grow. Weatherly noted that the behavioral health industry is still very fragmented, and many private practice providers are disconnected from other practices and the care continuum.
Additionally, provider burnout is high, and partnerships offer clinician founders a way to continue to practice without the billing and administrative burdens, Weatherly said.
The M&A strategy may help larger standardization efforts as well. For example, Weatherly said the organization’s scope allows it to have one of the country’s largest unified behavioral health data sets. These insights could help to advance care in the future.
“We will have the largest interventional psychiatry outcome measurements and data sets that are visible to all of our partners,” Weatherly said. “They get to touch, feel and see what’s working across the country, not just in their own practice. They don’t just go to a conference and come back with some research and apply to their practice. They are getting hands-on insight from each other, and inside of that iteration you can establish best practice for what is evidence-based … across the country, for different diagnoses, for different patient severities. The goal is to get these patients better and out.”
Beacon isn’t the only PE-backed mental health provider with an eye on acquisition.
Thurston Group-backed ARC Health, has a similar model where it offers sellers clinical autonomy and equity.
However, ARC only offers outpatient care.
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