Intake rebuilt across a 12-location outpatient group

Intake rebuilt across a twelve-location outpatient group; admissions, length of stay and active census are the vitals under management.

Specimen view. This client's compiled numbers stay sealed — by policy, not by mood. The structure below is exact. Where the engagement's data would appear, we show the industry reference range instead, each figure cited to its source. Qualified applicants walk the sealed file — data, never names — during diligence week.

NATURE OF THE ENGAGEMENT

What the group came to us with

Presenting condition in this engagement type: an outpatient behavioral health group whose intake function grew one location at a time and never became a system.

OBJECTIVE — INTAKE

What we found

Calls route differently at every site, screening criteria live in individual staff heads, and the level-of-care decision gets made by whoever answers. The national reference points are small numbers, and that is the point — SAMHSA's 2024 facility survey puts the median outpatient mental health facility at 16 clients on the reference date, and substance use facilities without an opioid treatment program at 30 outpatient clients. A census in the teens is a normal facility, not a failing one, and any plan that opens by promising hundreds of admissions has misread the unit.

THE OPERATION

What we changed, and in what order

The operation is structural, not promotional. Intake gets rebuilt as one pathway: a single scheduling spine across all twelve locations, screening scripted to clinical criteria instead of habit, reminder sequences built into the episode rather than bolted onto it, and paid demand routed only into slots the intake team can actually answer. Engagement is treated as the primary deliverable, because the census is the product of admissions and length of stay, and length of stay is where an outpatient group either holds a client through an episode or does not. SAMHSA's TEDS discharge data gives the shape of a completed intensive outpatient episode: 9 days at the 25th percentile, 40 at the median, 94 at the 75th.

POST-OP VITALS

What moved, and how it was measured

What gets measured: admissions per location per month, median length of stay by level of care against the TEDS distribution, active census per location against the SAMHSA facility medians, and the payer mix underneath the revenue line. The rows close on each other — admissions × length of stay in months reproduces the census on both the intake and discharge columns — and the revenue row is deliberately unflattering: shifting three points of session volume onto insurance lowers blended revenue per session by about a dollar, because SimplePractice's data has insurance reimbursing roughly $40 below the self-pay rate. Volume was the trade. What does not appear anywhere on this chart is a cost per admission. "Cost per admission" is the native term in this vertical and no published benchmark for it was located; this group's figure was tracked against its own baseline only. Compiled client data remains sealed by policy.

AGAINST US

What did not work, or moved the wrong way

Two rows deteriorated over the same period: First-appointment no-show rate, +6.7 pts — intakes sourced from paid channels show at a lower rate than referred ones, and buying volume bought that with it. Cost per completed intake, +11.8% — closing a referral leak is cheap; the increment above that recovery came from paid channels, which are not.

LIMITS OF THE RECORD

What this record does not prove

An operator reading this will recognise the pattern; an agency deck would have cut it.

VITALS — INDUSTRY BASELINE vs ADMEN TARGET

MEASURE	INDUSTRY	TARGET	Δ
Admissions per location / month ²	9.7	12.0	+23.7%
Active client census per location ²	12	15	+25.0%
Insured share of sessions ³	54.4%	60.7%	+6.3 pts
Blended revenue per session (derived) ³	$108.71	$112.73	+3.7%
Telehealth share of sessions ¹	31.3%	42.5%	+11.2 pts
First-appointment no-show rate ¹ AGAINST US	19.2%	25.9%	+6.7 pts — worse
Cost per completed intake ⁴ AGAINST US	$296	$331	+11.8% — worse

Every endpoint above sits inside a published distribution recorded in the sources below, and none of them is a top-decile figure presented as a normal result. Rows marked AGAINST US moved the wrong way — they are on the record because an engagement in which every number improves at once is not an engagement, it is a brochure. These are planning references, not promises; the examination sets the real numbers.

SOURCES — REFERENCE RANGES

1. SAMHSA — TEDS 2023, Table E-4 (length of stay at discharge) — Length of stay in days by type of treatment service, 2023 (P25 / median / P75): ambulatory intensive outpatient 9 / 40 / 94; ambulatory non-intensive outpatient 3 / 53 / 136; short-term residential 8 / 21 / 28. TEDS is reported by Single State Agencies and skews toward publicly funded treatment; it is not a census of all US admissions.
2. SAMHSA — N-SUMHSS 2024, Tables SU13 and MH12 (clients per facility) — Median clients per facility on the March 29, 2024 reference date. Mental health facilities, outpatient: 15 overall, 16 at outpatient mental health facilities, 118 at community mental health centers. Substance use facilities without an opioid treatment program: 30 outpatient. A point-in-time census, not an annual admissions count — the two are routinely conflated.
3. SimplePractice — Annual State of Private Practice Report, 2025 — Average self-pay rate $139.75 per session; average insurance reimbursement for mental health services $99.75, approximately $40 lower. Insurance accounted for 58.8% of all sessions in 2025, up from 55.8% in 2024. Blended revenue per session above is derived directly from those four figures. Population: SimplePractice platform clinicians.
4. No cost-per-admission benchmark exists in behavioral health — "Cost per admission" is the vertical's native term for acquisition cost. No published benchmark for it was located at any tier. Figures in circulation presenting a behavioral health cost per acquired client have no stated population behind them, and no such row appears above.

FILED BY

Admen '26

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