When I stepped in as CEO of Alsana in 2024, it took an average of 21 days for a person who called us to actually walk through our doors. Within months, we had cut that to 10. It was one of the most important things we did, and the reason was not the one most people expect.
The person on the other end of the phone
Behavioral health is unusual. The moment someone reaches out for help, often after months or years of ambivalence, is a narrow window. Motivation is real but fragile. Families are exhausted. Every day of delay is a day when the person can change their mind, get worse, or simply choose another provider who answered faster.
So I start with the clinical case: a shorter time-to-admit means more people get care at the moment they’re ready for it. That is reason enough.
And then the business case
The financial math is just as clear. Every day an approved, motivated patient waits is a day your bed or your program seat is empty, or filled by someone else. Slow admissions show up as soft census, missed budget and a referral network that quietly stops sending you people, because professionals refer to the programs that make it easy.
Referral partners don’t remember your brochure. They remember whether you called their patient back the same day.
When we fixed our front door, professional referrals rose 20%. That’s not a coincidence.
Where the days actually go
When I map an admissions process, the delay is almost never one big thing. It’s a dozen small hand-offs, each adding a day or two:
- Inquiry response: calls and web forms that wait hours, or until Monday.
- Clinical screening: assessments that need a specific clinician who is booked.
- Insurance verification and authorization: run in sequence instead of in parallel.
- Medical clearance: labs and records requests that nobody owns.
- Bed or seat assignment: decided in a weekly meeting rather than daily.
- Travel and logistics: left to the family to figure out.
What we changed
None of this was magic. It was disciplined operations:
- One owner for every inquiry, from first contact to the day of admission, with a clear same-day response standard.
- Parallel processing. Benefits verification, clinical screening and medical clearance started at the same time, not one after another.
- A daily admissions huddle with clinical, admissions and utilization review in the same 15 minutes, every day, looking at every open case.
- Simple, visible metrics: inquiries, conversion rate and days-to-admit by referral source, reviewed weekly by leadership.
- Closing the loop with referrers, so every professional who sent us someone heard back from us, fast.
Start here
If you lead a program, pull your last 90 days of admissions and calculate the median days from first inquiry to admission, broken out by referral source and level of care. Then map one recent admission hand-off by hand-off. I promise you’ll find days you can give back to your patients.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on what you find, I’m glad to help.
