There is huge demand for Behavioral Health.  So if there is this huge demand, what’s the best way to be in the service area or to be in the business? Most of the organization is on a disorder basis. So with probably the largest grouping of services being in the addictions arena, given the huge demand there. We then have service arenas for example eating disorder programs. There’s now some growing kind of management of outpatient, some of those public sector funded. Historically it’s pretty much all been insurance funded. So now there’s some growth in looking at programs that would be both traditional insurance and Medicaid or Medicare funded.

Investors focused on a behavioral health need to be sure that they’re ultimately picking and supporting a business that has a clear definition, a niche that supports their mission. There’s a lot of addiction programs and the ones that do well normally have a clearly identified approach to how they’re doing what they’re doing. So that it can be made tangible and communicated to the markets that they work in. There is much demand, but you can’t offer something that’s vanilla and expect to be treated well by the broader market place. It’s got to be really well defined. There’s a social part to this, and obviously we could have a whole social determinants discussion as well. It’s probably a little different than other areas of medicine in that many of the referral sources to these programs are, there’s a clear B2B component, but they’re psychologists and therapists, and other treatment programs, not necessarily all through MDs and health systems.

So the program needs to be defined and there needs to be an understanding on how to build a network in order to have a good strong referral base. Continuous care is good. Historically and it’s probably still the case, a lot of the really high margins have been in programs that are bedded, whether they’re inpatient or residential. But there have been improved margins now looking at the outpatient ambulatory sector as well, particularly what we call intensive outpatient programs and partial hospitalization programs, otherwise known as ILPs and PHPs, in the field. So the entire continuum is now very important.