When C.J. Davis, PsyD, became CEO at Centerstone, he walked into a role shaped by 35 years of leadership from David Guth Jr., whom he describes as one of the first leaders to expand behavioral health into a large, multi-state network in the early 2000s.
Mr. Guth, who is set to retire in July 2027, will be remembered for that bold bet he placed. At the time, the idea was, as Dr. Davis put it, a brand new concept. Today, Centerstone — a nonprofit spanning nine states with more than $1.1 billion in annual revenue — is the proof of concept.
Dr. Davis, a 30-plus-year behavioral health veteran who came up as a clinical psychologist before gravitating toward management, joined Centerstone through an affiliation completed in November. Over the next year, Mr. Guth will work as a strategic advisor to Dr. Davis during the transition.
“I have my own Mount Rushmore of people that have had a significant influence and impact over me,” Dr. Davis told Becker’s. “Just when you think your Mount Rushmore has come to a conclusion, you form a large partnership with a place like Centerstone, and then have the opportunity to work alongside David Guth.”
Centerstone’s structure alone is formidable: 140 board members, 11 boards across nine states, a research institute and a foundation. Dr. Davis credits the former CEO with cracking the code on applying large healthcare modeling to a rapidly growing behavioral health enterprise.
“How do you sync all the services together, how do you drive quality across the enterprise while also allowing CEOs of states to maintain local control and independence and drive quality as well?” Dr. Davis said. “David has been instrumental in growing and scaling, but also keeping a strong eye on quality.”
Mr. Guth also launched Bloomington, Ind.-based Centerstone’s Research Institute in 2001, an entity that currently employs over 70 researchers and professionals focused on clinical simulations, innovation and evidence-based practices.
At the top of Dr. Davis’ priority list: cementing Centerstone as a national leader in service delivery and defining what quality actually means.
“Far too long, behavioral health has been dictated to about what payers are willing to pay,” he said. “We have to take the responsibility of ensuring and defining what quality looks like in our systems.”
Dr. Davis has also seen the evidence of whole-person health bear out in Centerstone’s own markets: integrating mental health, primary care, substance use treatment, pharmacy, social supports and technology under one roof produces better outcomes. He wants the model refined and expanded.
But perhaps the most forward-leaning part of Dr. Davis’s agenda is the push into predictive analytics, a sector of technology he believes behavioral health has just begun to tap.
“Using technology as tools and doing something that I think we have not yet established in behavioral healthcare, which is utilizing predictive analytics and engineering to better understand when people are on the cusp of experiencing distress versus waiting for them to experience distress,” he said.
Dr. Davis frames it around the concept of behavioral health biomarkers — signals in patient data, appointment patterns and reported symptoms that could predict deterioration before crisis sets in
“If we were to create, for lack of a better term, biomarkers in behavioral health, we can almost begin to understand when somebody is going to experience an increase in distressing symptoms — whether it’s the symptoms they report, the no-shows, etc.” he said. “We have to build better predictive modeling, and then assign prescriptive analytics.”
The ultimate goal is to provide patients with earlier identification and easier paths, he said. Just as health systems do not have the goal of building more EDs, crisis care providers desire to keep more patients out of crisis.
“Behavioral healthcare has not used big data informatics,” Dr. Davis said. “How do we use informatics to help guide services in a way that a community gets more benefit from organizations like Centerstone versus only waiting and sitting back for them to experience more distressing symptoms before they walk through our door?”
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