When my business partner and I ran a multi-state behavioral health organization, one of our top challenges was accounting for how we spent our marketing dollars. Like many owner-operators, we also struggled to track conversations with potential clients and our business development team’s plans and pipeline. In the early days of our operation, which was more than 10 years ago, we tracked admissions with generic customer relationship management, or CRM, software. My partner and I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars customizing this generic CRM and paying consulting and administration fees to bend the tool to fit our behavioral health processes. Ultimately, frustration led us to develop software to automate many of our processes and better understand the return on our marketing dollars.
We had the skill and training to develop our own CRM software. But thousands of other owner-operators still track marketing and admissions manually, use a CRM developed as an afterthought by an EMR provider, or turn to CRM software designed for other industries and adapt it to behavioral health.
Given the number of U.S. behavioral health organizations in business, the need to improve how they track marketing, referrals, admissions, and alumni relationships is significant. A 2024 National Substance Use and Mental Health Services report noted there were 23,948 facilities providing substance use treatment, mental health treatment, or both. The business environment for these organizations has become more challenging over the last five years.
For example, a 2025 KFF survey found that behavioral health rate increases are slowing. Reimbursement rates from commercial health plans and Medicare are not keeping pace with the cost of providing treatment. That puts pressure on behavioral health operators to understand where their dollars are going and which activities produce results.
Marketing is an area where it can be difficult to measure how spending affects results. Online advertising is expensive. The average cost per lead for healthcare search ads can be $70, while the average CPL for addiction recovery can be almost twice that. Marketing remains an important part of maintaining a consistent admissions pipeline, but higher costs make it increasingly important for operators to understand what they are getting in return.
It’s increasingly important that behavioral health organizations think about the way they measure marketing. It is not enough to know how many leads a campaign generates. Organizations need to close the loop by connecting lead-generation campaigns to the revenue they can collect as part of care. Operators need to understand what happened to their leads. How many qualified as opportunities? How many resulted in admissions? Which referral sources produced admissions? What did those admissions cost to acquire? And, over time, which sources brought patients who remained in treatment, stepped down appropriately, returned for care, and had policies that paid for care.
Those questions require a view of the full client relationship, not a single marketing metric.
Generic CRM systems can help with some of this work. But they are not designed for behavioral health organizations. Facility owners may spend significant amounts of money purchasing, configuring, and training staff on a generic CRM, only to find that important parts of their workflow still require manual processes or more customization.
Behavioral health organizations have operational considerations that differ from other industries. Operators think about step-downs in outpatient care, referral partner relationships, admissions activity, alumni engagement, and calculating the true cost per admission. These factors all contribute to the picture an operator needs to understand.
Alumni engagement is one example. For behavioral health organizations, the relationship with a former client does not necessarily end when treatment does. Regular, personalized communication helps an organization connect with alumni who may need support again. Systems that make this type of outreach easier contribute to stronger alumni engagement. Relapses are an unfortunate reality. In our experience, software tailored for behavioral health can keep an operator in closer contact with alumni and recapture up to 25 percent (or more) additional patients who might go somewhere else, or not gotten help at all.
The same principle applies to operational data. As organizations grow, their marketing and admissions processes become more complex. They add locations, programs, referral sources, and marketing channels. Marketing spend increases, and executives have more activity to evaluate.
A useful CRM helps an operator answer a basic question: What is driving admissions and growth?
That question extends beyond marketing. When an owner-operator connects operational data with outcomes, the information identifies patterns in early departures and other challenges. Our data has shown that addressing the factors associated with negative discharges materially reduces the number of clients who leave treatment prematurely.
Smaller organizations need this visibility, too. We know from running a multi-state behavioral health organization that a CRM becomes increasingly useful once an owner is admitting around 30 patients per month. At that point, the volume of conversations, referral relationships, admissions activity, and marketing sources makes it difficult to manage the business using individual spreadsheets, memory, or disconnected systems.
The important consideration is not whether an organization has a CRM. It is whether the system reflects the way the organization operates. Traditional CRM companies have increasingly added behavioral health features, including tools to process admissions and identify referral sources. These additions can be useful. But adapting a system designed for another industry to the behavioral health environment requires significant customization.
Newer systems designed specifically for behavioral health are also incorporating AI. AI can help automate outreach, support marketing activities, and assist admissions teams with calls and other routine work. But the technology itself is only part of the equation. When considering a system, the more important two-part question is: Does this system give a clear view of the business and allow building workflows that match the way a team works?
For behavioral health owners, that means moving beyond asking how many leads a marketing campaign has generated. Measuring marketing ROI requires connecting a marketing investment to admissions, revenue, patient progression, referral relationships, and longer-term outcomes.
That was the problem we were trying to solve when we built our CRM more than a decade ago. Over time, the process changed how we approached marketing. Instead of relying primarily on instinct to determine where to spend, technology gave us better financial insight into which strategies and tactics were producing a return.
For behavioral health organizations operating in today’s challenging reimbursement environment, the distinction matters. Marketing can fuel growth. But growth requires technology that can measure how marketing is helping a behavioral health organization.
About David Farache
David Farache is CEO and co-founder of Boca Raton, Fla.-based Dazos, a provider of software to accelerate admissions, recover lost revenue, and streamline operations for behavioral health facility executives and staff. Prior to Dazos, Farache, with Louis Devaleix, successfully operated a multi-state behavioral health organization on the U.S. East Coast.
