Ava Health opens Feb. 9 with transparency at the heart of its business model

Tim Harty, The Business Times

Chris Bennett uses the word transparent frequently when discussing Ava Health, an addiction and mental health treatment center that will open Feb. 9 at 2784 Crossroads Blvd. in Grand Junction.

Because of all of the things that will be different about Ava Health, transparency is screaming, “Look at me!”

It is a cornerstone of the trust Ava Health wants to build in an industry where Bennett, Ava’s chief executive officer, said, “Trust is broken.”

And he wrote in his Jan. 29 newsletter, a weekly exercise in transparency: “You do not rebuild trust with polish. You rebuild it with visibility and accountability and a willingness to be seen when it is uncomfortable.”

Put another way, Bennett says: “Transparency equals trust.”

So, what others hide, Ava Health will display in broad daylight on Colorado’s Western Slope.

And in a business that provides behavioral health care, this is not normal behavior.

“Nobody will share financials. Nobody will share outcomes. Nobody will show what the return on their investment was,” Bennett said, adding stakeholders and investors are good at saying they invested in the business and the community, and the discourse stops there.

“There’s no feedback loop, so it’s like money goes in, and it’s a black hole,” Bennett said. “Then if you look at families who have loved ones that are struggling with mental health or substance use, they’re sending their loved ones somewhere and saying, ‘How’s it going? How’s the care proceeding? What’s going on? What are the next steps?’ And they’re not getting the feedback. Like, the true receiver of services is our client, right? Yet the families are not being communicated with.”

Bennett said most of what people historically get to see is manipulative marketing practices, a “big, shiny object of ‘this is what we do,’ and yet the service is not congruent with that. And then if you look at a client’s experience, somebody that’s actually struggling with mental health or substances, they’re being sold something until they walk in the door. And then it is a very incongruent: ‘Hey, this is what we were told, this is what we were sold, and now we’re here, and it is drastically different.’

“So then you have communities coming together and going, ‘What’s going on here?’”

Bennett said such questions will get answered at Ava Health. It won’t just be words, either. Where Ava Health can show, not just tell, it will. (Editor’s note: Ava Health does not share patient’s private information).

“For us,” he said, “transparency has been something for the last two years that we’ve talked about, which was: What if we were a healthcare company that actually just shared everything? And not only externally, but internally. Meaning that we share our financials openly with every single staff member.

“So, our CFO, David (Purinton), on Monday (Jan. 26), was with 23 new employees, pulling up budgets and financials for our entire company. And the feedback that came out of that was employees saying, ‘What is this? You’re willing to share, like, your financials with us?’ And we’re like, ‘Well, yes. This is fundamentally what we believe in.’

“How can we achieve what we want to if leadership is up in some silo, not being transparent, not communicating about what’s going on, how we’re actually doing, and just kind of bestowing, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do’ without a lot of the explanation?”

Bennett gives the example of billionaire Mark Cuban, who is a critic of the United States health care system and its high costs and lack of transparency.

“He’s been asking hospitals about why they’re not treating the Medicaid and Medicare populations,” Bennett said. “And they’re saying because it’s not profitable, and we can’t maintain a sustainable healthcare ecosystem by serving the masses. And so he says, ‘Great. Show me.’

“Nobody at this point has been willing to open the books. So, he’s a billionaire with leverage, with relationships, with capital, saying, ‘Hey, I think we can actually do this in a profitable way. … I know how to run a business. It’s not making sense to me. And there’s no transparency.’”

Bennett said transparency could be a multi-hour conversation, but he knows that’s not conducive to a newspaper article, so when it comes to Ava Health he boiled it down to this:

“I think for us, it was, ‘How can we build trust? How can we build trust with communities?’” he said. “Ultimately, we were outsiders to Grand Junction two years ago. So, how do we build trust with this community? How do we build trust with the stakeholders? How do we build trust with funding and payers? How do we build trust with people that are struggling, their families and our employees?

“And ultimately, a lot of healthcare systems we all come from have bred a lot of distrust, including myself, because we’ve worked in environments that made decisions that didn’t make any sense, and there was no explanation and all of that.

“So, that’s probably as short of an answer I can give, but it was really ultimately trust. Transparency equals trust to us.”

While the Ava Health leadership team has been inspired to be transparent, the inspiration comes from within. It was not on display anywhere else for Ava Health’s founders – Bennett, Purinton and Chief Operating Offer Ian Gershman – to see and emulate.

“I haven’t seen another company do it,” Bennett said. “I think the extent of what we’ve seen are there are more behavioral health companies starting to now share outcomes data. So, actually how effective is the programming that you’re providing, right? … You see some companies coming forth and saying, ‘Hey, you don’t have to believe our marketing as much; believe our outcomes.’ Fantastic.

“But the idea of basically complete transparency, I’ve never seen it done. Not in healthcare anywhere, in even our small subset of healthcare. There was no blueprint for it. What Ian and David and I kind of came together and thought was, again, the fundamental idea was trust.”

What Care Actually Costs at Ava Health

When the leadership team at Ava Health said they will be transparent, even with the company’s financials, they meant it. Chief Executive Officer Christopher Bennett writes a weekly email newsletter, and a recent one included the following:

What Care Actually Costs at Ava Health

Behavioral health programs can tell families what they charge. Very few will clearly explain what that pays for. So we’re doing it.

Below is a snapshot of Ava Health’s cash-pay cost of care, based on pre-launch financial modeling. These numbers reflect how resources are actually allocated across our core levels of care that are launching February 9th.

PHP + 3.1 Housing (SUD + Co-Occurring Care)

$477 per day | $14,300 per month

• 39% Personnel
• 7% Client costs
• 12% Housing & facilities
• 22% Operations
• 20% Margin

IOP + 3.1 Housing (SUD + Co-Occurring Care)

$383 per day | $11,500 per month

• 39% Personnel
• 8% Client costs
• 13% Housing
• 23% Operations
• 17% Margin

HIOP (aka) PHP + 3.1 Housing (Primary Mental Health)

$500 per day | $15,000 per month

• 39% Personnel
• 8% Client costs
• 11% Housing
• 21% Operations
• 21% Margin

IOP + Housing (Primary Mental Health)

$417 per day | $12,520 per month

• 42% Personnel
• 8% Client costs
• 12% Housing
• 22% Operations
• 16% Margin

Why we’re sharing this: Transparency isn’t a campaign for us. It’s how we’re choosing to operate. If you want the full cost-of-care breakdown, our private-pay rates, or have questions, just reply and ask.

SEE RELATED STORY: MORE ABOUT AVA HEALTH