Behavioral health leaders are not short on data. The harder task is knowing which numbers will persuade executives, payers and city officials to launch, expand or save a program, and those numbers often sit downstream of the behavioral health encounter itself.
That challenge shaped the panel “Behavioral Health Data That Drives Executive Decisions” at Becker’s Behavioral Health Fall Summit 2026. Across four organizations, the most persuasive figures captured avoided emergency department visits, readmissions and arrests, along with total cost of care — value that fee-for-service metrics tend to miss.
The metrics to watch
At Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth, executives track screening rates most closely, said Elicia Bunch, the system’s vice president of behavioral health. UCHealth performs about 1.6 million behavioral health screens a year. Ms. Bunch said she keeps two statistics in mind: Half of people who die by suicide saw primary care within 30 days of their death, and 85% had a healthcare interaction in the year before. Identifying risk in primary care, the ED and inpatient units, where patients already present, is the clearest chance to change their outcomes, she said.
At Corvallis, Ore.-based Samaritan Health Services, the focus is the ED, said Robert Fallows, senior medical director of behavioral health at Samaritan Medical Group.
“If our behavioral health system is not functioning like it’s supposed to be functioning, people are going to show up in the emergency room,” Mr. Fallows said. “It’s a really good indicator as to how we are doing as a system.”
The ED also matters for cost and flow. Samaritan runs the region’s capitated Medicaid plan, and repeat ED visits that don’t meet patients’ needs cost far more than an appointment with a psychiatrist, psychologist or social worker. Oregon also has some of the lowest hospital bed-to-population ratios, and behavioral health patients stay in the ED five to six times longer than typical medical patients, Mr. Fallows said.
Collecting the data
Some health systems have reported challenges when it comes to measurement-based care compliance. At Nashville, Tenn.-based Mental Health Cooperative, which serves patients in Memphis and across Tennessee, only 11% of patients on dopamine blockers had received involuntary movement screenings in 2024, said Corey Cronrath, DO, the organization’s chief medical officer and chief medical informatics officer.
The organization built dashboards showing who was on a dopamine blocker, their diagnoses and their last screening. Case managers learned which patients on their panels needed one, nurses got a flag at intake and physicians were alerted, so three people had flagged the need by the time a patient reached the physician. Within a year, the rate rose to 17%.
For Melany Roque, RN, director of behavioral health at North Vista Hospital in Las Vegas, consistency comes from explaining the why. Her team dissects the patient survey the 114-bed behavioral health unit submits to CMS question by question and shares the findings with front-line staff.
“We provide daily huddles in every shift in our facility. We select topics. [And ask] what is the most important [thing] that we have to focus on?” Ms. Roque said.
Dr. Cronrath said frustration with data collection often comes from clinicians looking at a computer instead of a patient. The organization is turning to generative AI to capture the conversation and draft notes, and to agentic AI to place information in the correct fields.
“We don’t want anything to get in between the clinician and the patient,” Dr. Cronrath said.
When the data changed the decision
At Samaritan, a substance use disorder consult program pairing an addiction medicine physician with peer support specialists nearly didn’t survive its midyear review. Only 10% to 15% of patients presenting with substance use disorder were getting a consult, and leaders were preparing to end it.
Then the system’s research team took a closer look. Patients who saw the consult team had a 34-day mortality rate of about 1%, compared with about 7% for those who didn’t, and readmission rates of about 15% versus about 20%. With hospital stays costing about $4,000 a day and averaging five days for these patients, avoiding even a handful of admissions adds up quickly, Mr. Fallows said.
“That really allowed us to be able to go back to our executive team and to our Medicaid plan and say, let’s talk about a value-based payment arrangement. We’ll make sure that we can keep this important program going. Something we wouldn’t have seen just off of penetration rate alone,” Mr. Fallows said.
The lesson, he said, is to bring researchers in when a program launches. Samaritan’s research capacity is two people: an epidemiologist who also manages hospital grants and a researcher supporting graduate medical education.
At Mental Health Cooperative, census data showed more than 65% of patients at its Memphis locations were under 18, most with neurodevelopmental disorders. The organization shifted resources toward autism and intellectual and developmental disability care, including school-based programs, speech pathology and applied behavior analysis therapy, vetting ABA partners through small pilots and 30-day out clauses.
A separate conversation with a managed care organization revealed only seven Medicaid claims statewide for transcranial magnetic stimulation. Under a per-member, per-month arrangement, savings from fewer ED visits can sustain the service, Dr. Cronrath said, and the organization is now implementing it.
Making the case to payers
Ms. Bunch said behavioral health’s value reaches well beyond fee-for-service encounter metrics, making per-member, per-month and total cost of care arrangements a better fit.
UCHealth’s co-response teams, which pair a behavioral health professional with a law enforcement officer, avoid ED use and arrest more than 80% of the time. The next step is showing what that saves insurers and municipalities, which requires integrating data across the enterprise, she said.
“We tend to be siloed in our specialty world. At UCHealth, for example, we have really great data sets in our various levels of care and programs. But the key really is how do you integrate all of that?” Ms. Bunch said.
The goal is an enterprisewide dashboard that reflects traditional metrics alongside the downstream impact on chronic disease management and utilization across the system, she said.
In Nevada, Ms. Roque said Medicaid managed care plans are issuing more denials and steering patients to crisis centers, yet many patients return to the ED within 24 hours, a problem compounded by limited state resources and homelessness.
Dr. Cronrath has taken a cost argument to officials in Nashville, where crisis response funding has been flat for five years. The case compares the cost of jail bookings with stays at a crisis stabilization unit, where patients can be connected to outpatient care, long-acting injectables and help with housing, food and utilities.
“And then taking that information to the city council saying here is the cost that’s saving. … So why don’t we no longer pay for punishment, and start paying for rehabilitation?” Dr. Cronrath said.
Mr. Fallows urged leaders to view behavioral health the way they view surgery, which is allowed to operate at a loss because of the services it drives downstream. A three-year analysis with Samaritan’s Medicaid partners found annual spending of about $7,000 to $10,000 for members without serious and persistent mental illness or addiction, compared with about $25,000 for members with one of those diagnoses.
“For us it really became let’s draw that bright line about how do we lower that spend knowing that we’re also going to be improving quality of life along the way,” Mr. Fallows said.
At the Becker's Fall Behavioral Health Summit, taking place November 4–5 in Chicago, behavioral health leaders and executives will explore strategies for expanding access to care, integrating services, addressing workforce challenges and leveraging innovation to improve outcomes across the behavioral health continuum. Apply for complimentary registration now.
