High Demand & Falling Revenue

By Monica E. Oss, Chief Executive Officer, OPEN MINDS

Not surprisingly, this headline caught my attention—Mental Health Jobs Boom Threatened By Trump’s Funding Cuts—when it appeared yesterday. The facts aren’t surprising. The Trump administration has sought to revoke more than $11 billion in grants for behavioral health services and an additional $1 billion for mental health services in schools. This includes many of the Biden administration’s programs focused on expanding the behavioral health workforce. During this same time period, the Administration also announced it would no longer enforce mental health parity laws.

And then there is the Congressional budget bill, just signed into law last week. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) anticipates that 11.8 million individuals will lose their health insurance over the next ten years as a result. This is a combination of the effects of new Medicaid work requirements, limits on eligibility for immigrants, and the expiration of premium supports for the Affordable Care Act.

But while the funding cuts will certainly reduce the revenue of behavioral health provider organizations, they won’t decrease demand. As of the most recent data, 23% of U.S. adults had a mental illness (6% a serious mental illness), and 17% a substance use disorder. These prevalence numbers have remained unchanged since the end of the COVID pandemic.

For most of those provider organizations (over 90% of which are non-profit organizations), continued demand in the face of revenue decline is a daunting challenge. Many of them serve as the behavioral health ‘safety net’ for their communities. And this mismatch between demand and revenue is happening at the same time that the clinician workforce is burning out and aging out. Record numbers of clinical professionals are leaving the field. In 2022, a total of 145,213 health care professionals left their jobs—including 10,000 clinical social workers. At the same time, the retirement issue looms large. The average age of the workforce in many disciplines is over 50. Notably, the average age of psychologists is 58, and the average age of addiction medicine physicians is 57.

The challenge for executive teams is how to balance this situation—competing for a shrinking workforce at a time when demand for behavioral health services remains high and revenue is decreasing. It is a strategic puzzle.

So how do executive teams plan to maintain that flexible, efficient, effective, tech-enabled clinician team they need for the future? These issues and more were explored during the session Tech Enabled Recruiting & Retention: Best Practices For Competing For The Best Talent, presented by Jefferson Center’s Brandon Ward, Psy.D., Vice President of Information Systems & Chief Innovation Officer and David Goff, Vice President of Administration & Chief Financial Officer. 

Founded in 1958 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, Jefferson Center is a non-profit provider of behavioral health treatment serving nearly 27,000 consumers per year at 12 locations throughout Colorado. The organization, with more than $80 million in revenue in 2024, is meeting this challenge with a tech-enabled talent management strategy. Dr. Ward and Mr. Goff spoke to the five key tech functions that have helped them stay competitive in recruiting and retention of clinical staff: AI-powered screening, automation of candidate journeys, tech-enabled on-boarding, employee listening and retention technology, and metrics-based talent management.

Using AI to automate the candidate screening process is an important part of Jefferson Center’s talent management strategy. The organization has been able to more quickly match applicants’ skills and experience to roles, while also reducing bias in the applicant screening process. AI-powered tools have allowed the organization to identify passive candidates—people who haven’t applied for jobs but could be open to the right opportunity. “Most folks in the workforce right now are passively open, if not actively open, to moving around,” Dr. Ward said.

Automation of candidate journeys is another component of the Jefferson Center talent management strategy. The technology driving these improvements includes customer relationship management (CRM) and applicant tracking platforms (ATPs) to nurture long-term candidate relationships and to automate outreach with personalized messaging. The results include decreased time-to-hire and an overall better candidate experience. Jefferson Center acquired off-the-shelf solutions to serve as the foundation of their tech-enabled strategy, then built some analytics solutions using Microsoft Power BI to augment the data presentation.

Once hired, the Jefferson team is using tech-enabled onboarding. Seamless onboarding and internal mobility are increasingly expected by job candidates and existing staff. And the Jefferson team has found that digital onboarding has led to higher early retention rates.

On an ongoing basis, after the initial on-boarding, the Jefferson team is using employee listening and retention technology to gather real-time feedback from employees. The speakers said that this has been critical to increasing employee retention rates by providing information to managers on employee engagement (to identify flight risks and burnout signals) and providing information to employees on career pathways. “Part of the process is that we send out surveys at the end of the year, and we get a pretty good rate of maybe 70% to 72% in terms of staff responding,” Mr. Goff said. “We actually found out a couple of years in a row that our pay wasn’t where it needed to be, so we did make an adjustment.” 

Finally, to track the overall success of their talent management initiatives and investments in related technology, the Jefferson Center team uses a metrics-driven approach—tracking engagement trends, turnover rates, and intervention outcomes to continuously refine their strategy. The metrics allow the executive team to assess the return on investment of tech functionality and improve the use of those tech tools.

For organizations that are just starting to implement tech-enabled talent management tools, Dr. Ward and Mr. Goff suggested starting with simple traditional methods and minimal tech. After standardized processes are in place, the system can adopt basic automation, followed by an integrated tech stack, and eventually a predictive and personalized approach to the recruiting and retention process. And as they look ahead, Mr. Goff said they were evaluating emerging talent management technologies like predictive analytics for attrition, chatbots for 24/7 candidate engagement, virtual reality (VR) onboarding, and generative AI for personalized outreach and job descriptions. Dr. Ward observed, “Not only do we have to think like technologists—because all of this technology is woven throughout the process—but we also have to think like marketers and how we’re relating, connecting, and creating an experience and an image from the beginning, all the way through the employment lifecycle.”