WellSky CEO Tom Fahey brings extensive behavioral health technology expertise developed through decades of industry engagement, having led Health Care Software from 1996 before the company became part of WellSky in late 2019, positioning him to guide the organization’s behavioral health platform development addressing the specialized documentation requirements, workflow complexities, and care coordination challenges that distinguish psychiatric treatment from general medical care. The company has established itself as a major post-acute care technology provider serving more than 20,000 client organizations globally including leading health and human service agencies, major hospital systems, government entities, and behavioral health providers requiring comprehensive electronic health record systems, revenue cycle management tools, care coordination capabilities, and interoperability solutions enabling data exchange across fragmented healthcare delivery systems.
Fahey’s career trajectory illustrates how deep industry relationships and client collaboration inform effective technology development in behavioral health where user experience, clinical workflow accommodation, and specialized functionality prove critical to platform adoption and utilization. His leadership philosophy emphasizes partnership approaches where technology companies work closely with provider organizations to design solutions addressing their specific operational needs rather than imposing generic systems developed without sufficient understanding of behavioral health’s unique characteristics including narrative documentation patterns, specialized assessment instruments, multidisciplinary treatment team coordination, and regulatory compliance requirements that differ substantially from acute medical care settings.
Platform Capabilities Support Comprehensive Organizational Functions
The WellSky behavioral health platform provides integrated functionality supporting critical operations for inpatient psychiatric hospitals and associated outpatient services, beginning with customer relationship management modules enabling organizations to track referral partner engagement and capture pre-admission information facilitating intake processes. This front-end capability proves particularly important for behavioral health facilities where admissions often occur through complex referral networks involving emergency departments, community mental health centers, outpatient providers, law enforcement, courts, and family members rather than through straightforward physician referrals characterizing many medical admissions.
The platform automates admission workflows feeding into fully paperless electronic health record systems incorporating pharmacy information management, revenue cycle tools including billing and collections ensuring appropriate reimbursement for delivered services, and back-office financial functions streamlining operations. This comprehensive integration eliminates redundant data entry, reduces administrative burden, improves information accuracy through single-source data management, and enables organizations to operate more efficiently than fragmented systems requiring manual information transfer between disconnected applications.
Fahey emphasized that consolidating functionality within single platforms maximizes efficiency while minimizing redundant activities that waste staff time and create opportunities for errors, with integrated systems enabling seamless information flow from initial contact through admission, treatment delivery, discharge planning, and financial settlement. This integration proves especially valuable for behavioral health organizations that have historically relied on paper documentation and manual processes more extensively than other healthcare sectors, with electronic health record adoption lagging behind acute care hospitals and physician practices due to behavioral health’s unique requirements that generic medical EHR systems struggled to accommodate effectively.
Behavioral Health Documentation Requires Specialized Functionality
Technology needs for behavioral health care differ substantially from general medical settings due to specific documentation requirements that tend toward narrative formats capturing nuanced clinical observations, therapeutic interactions, and treatment progress that standardized templates and checkbox interfaces cannot adequately represent. Behavioral health clinicians need systems accommodating detailed narrative documentation of patient presentations, therapeutic interventions, treatment responses, risk assessments, and multidisciplinary team communications that convey clinical complexity and inform ongoing treatment planning more effectively than structured data entry formats optimized for billing and quality reporting but inadequate for authentic clinical practice.
WellSky partnered closely with client organizations to build tools enhancing their unique workflows rather than forcing behavioral health providers to adapt clinical practices to technology systems designed for different care contexts. This client-driven development approach ensures that platforms reflect actual operational realities and support rather than impede clinical effectiveness, with user feedback informing iterative improvements addressing pain points, adding requested capabilities, and refining interfaces based on frontline staff experiences.
Usability receives tremendous emphasis through user interface design enabling clinicians to intuitively navigate systems without extensive training, recognizing that technology adoption depends critically on whether staff find platforms easy to use during busy clinical workflows where complex interfaces create frustration and resistance. While comprehensive training remains essential, platforms must provide sufficient intuitiveness that users can accomplish basic tasks without constantly consulting manuals or help desk support, with well-designed systems reducing cognitive load and enabling clinicians to focus attention on patient care rather than struggling with technology mechanics.
Inpatient Psychiatric Settings Demand Specialized Mobile Tools
Inpatient psychiatric facilities require unique functionality addressing safety monitoring obligations including mandated patient observation at regular intervals, with facilities typically requiring that staff visually observe patients every 15 minutes documenting their status and any concerning behaviors, risk indicators, or needs requiring intervention. This “rounding” practice represents standard psychiatric hospital protocol ensuring patient safety, preventing self-harm or suicide attempts, monitoring for medical complications, and providing therapeutic presence supporting patients through acute crises.
WellSky developed mobile applications enabling staff to efficiently conduct rounds while documenting observations in real-time through portable devices, eliminating previous workflows where staff completed paper documentation at nursing stations after completing rounds or maintaining separate paper logs requiring subsequent transcription into electronic systems. Mobile documentation improves efficiency, accuracy, and timeliness while ensuring that clinical staff spend maximum time providing direct patient care and therapeutic interaction rather than managing administrative paperwork.
This specialized functionality exemplifies how behavioral health platforms must address setting-specific requirements that general medical EHR systems never contemplated, with successful vendors demonstrating willingness to invest in developing behavioral health-specific tools rather than expecting providers to accept inadequate generic functionality or maintain workarounds compensating for system limitations.
Interoperability Enables Care Coordination Across Settings
Many WellSky behavioral health clients develop joint venture relationships with general hospital systems operating mainstream electronic health records including Epic and Cerner, creating interoperability requirements where psychiatric facilities must exchange clinical information with partner organizations using different technology platforms. Effective data exchange proves critical for care coordination when patients transition between emergency departments and psychiatric units, when medical complications require transfer to general medical settings, when discharge planning involves connecting patients with community providers, or when integrated care models require behavioral health and primary care coordination.
WellSky prioritizes interoperability capabilities enabling its behavioral health platform to communicate effectively with Epic, Cerner, and other major health information systems, recognizing that standalone behavioral health facilities increasingly operate within broader healthcare networks requiring seamless information flow rather than functioning as isolated entities with minimal external data exchange. The company’s recent CarePort acquisition strengthens care coordination capabilities through market-leading technology perfecting care transition workflows that Fahey characterizes as game-changing for enabling stakeholders to collaborate around patient needs during vulnerable transition periods when coordination failures frequently occur.
CarePort’s care coordination platform addresses the persistent challenge where patients moving between care settings experience information gaps because providers lack access to complete medical histories, current medications, pending test results, or treatment plans from previous settings. These information deficits generate duplicative testing, medication errors, care plan discontinuity, and poor outcomes that effective interoperability and care coordination tools can prevent through ensuring that receiving providers access comprehensive patient information enabling appropriate treatment decisions.
Client Success Story Demonstrates Partnership Value
SUN Behavioral Health’s expansion provides an illustrative example of successful client partnership, with the organization building four inpatient psychiatric facilities from the ground up while implementing WellSky’s platform progressively across each location. The partnership began with SUN’s first Houston, Texas facility before expanding to Ohio, Kentucky, and Delaware locations, with the Delaware facility opening as a completely paperless operation from day one utilizing fully electronic workflows and documentation.
This achievement represents significant accomplishment in behavioral health where paper-based documentation has persisted longer than most healthcare sectors, with many psychiatric facilities continuing to rely partially or completely on paper charts due to technology limitations, staff resistance, implementation challenges, or financial constraints preventing electronic health record adoption. SUN Behavioral Health’s ability to open new facilities with comprehensive electronic systems operational from initial patient admissions demonstrates both WellSky’s platform maturity and SUN’s organizational commitment to technology-enabled operations.
The ongoing partnership across multiple facilities enables SUN to leverage workflows, templates, and configurations developed in earlier implementations when opening subsequent locations, reducing implementation timelines and costs while ensuring operational consistency across the organization’s growing footprint. This scalability proves essential for multi-site behavioral health operators pursuing expansion strategies, with technology platforms either facilitating or impeding growth depending on whether they support efficient replication of proven operational models across new facilities.
Industry Landscape Presents Opportunities and Challenges
Fahey noted that one in five Americans experiences mental illness while Mental Health America research indicates that 57% of individuals with mental illness receive no treatment, revealing enormous gaps between population needs and service utilization that represent both public health crisis and market opportunity. This treatment gap reflects multiple barriers including provider shortages, insurance limitations, stigma, geographic access challenges, financial constraints, and fragmented delivery systems that prevent many individuals from accessing needed care despite the prevalence of mental health conditions affecting diverse populations.
However, Fahey expressed optimism that stigma reduction, telehealth expansion, increased funding, and growing provider investment in new programs and facilities will improve treatment access, with technology platforms enabling organizations to efficiently scale operations meeting growing demand. Recent Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services waivers expanding telehealth coverage for behavioral health services alongside broader policy initiatives prioritizing mental health represent favorable developments supporting sector growth.
The combination of persistent treatment gaps, favorable policy environment, reduced stigma, and technology enablement creates conditions where behavioral health providers can substantially expand capacity serving populations historically unable to access care. WellSky positions itself to support this growth through platforms designed to facilitate client expansion as organizations open new facilities, add service lines, pursue joint ventures, or scale existing operations responding to demand increases.
Fahey emphasized particular hope around care coordination improvements through CarePort integration enabling behavioral health providers to participate more effectively in care transitions and information exchange with general medical providers, potentially breaking down longstanding silos that have isolated behavioral health from broader healthcare delivery. Building bridges connecting care settings addresses the universal frustration where patients and providers lack access to comprehensive health information, with better coordination potentially improving outcomes while reducing costs through preventing duplicative services and ensuring treatment continuity.
As behavioral health technology continues evolving to meet sector needs while supporting interoperability and care coordination across increasingly integrated delivery systems, companies like WellSky occupying intersection of behavioral health expertise and comprehensive post-acute care platforms are positioned to enable the care transformation that population health improvement demands.
