SPP Weekend Reader: Selling Your Practice, Medicare Telehealth, Self-Healing Orgs and Three Best Buys for $20-ish
Poignant clip about CEO life expectancy from this week’s webinar on “Creating a Self Healing Organization.” You can see the full webinar and earn 2 CEs (NBCC ACEP #7233) by clicking here. As always, this is free for our 1F and Streamline group members, as well as included in the 12 webinar package for all of our 2025 Practice Development Webinar series participants.
🚨 Top Headlines This Week
Behavioral Health M&A Market Poised for Strong 2026 – Opportunities for Practice Growth
The Big Story: Mental health industry analysts are predicting a resurgence in behavioral health mergers and acquisitions in 2026, with autism/ABA services and outpatient mental health leading the way. Private equity and venture capital remain strong buyers despite some market challenges, but an increasing number of larger group practices, hospitals and medical systems are trying to get into the mental health game through acquisition.
Key Trends:
- Autism and IDD services commanding the highest valuations in behavioral health
- Outpatient models that include PHP/IOP are seeing increased valuations over just talk therapy practices.
- Growing investor interest in practices that provide care for treatment-resistant diagnoses
- One-on-one talk therapy faces a growing profitability challenge leading to lower sales prices for practices.
Why It Matters to You: If you’re considering selling your practice, you need to focus your efforts on profitability and diversification of revenue over “vanity metrics” like revenue and headcount. Purchasers are not nearly as interested in what you bring in, as how much you keep after expenses and how diversified (protected) your income streams are from one another.
Key Takeaway: Outpatient models with strong commercial insurance payer mixes are most attractive to investors. If you’re building for the long term, focus on service diversification and consider adding specialized services like IPPs or adolescent care to increase practice value.
Action Step: Get a valuation, even if an informal one, to know where you’re starting and how your profitability and revenue mix needs to change to get the exit price you need. Reach out to Ken@SemiPrivatePractice.com for an introduction to someone who can do an evaluation if you don’t already have a connection.
Medicare Telehealth Flexibilities Officially Expire – What This Means for Your Practice
The Big Story: As of October 1, 2025, Medicare’s COVID-era telehealth flexibilities have officially expired following the government shutdown. This marks a significant shift for telehealth only group practices and private practices who have relied on expanded telehealth coverage since the pandemic.
Why It Matters to You: Practices (both yours and competitors) will experience substantial hurdles in getting paid for services, while also remaining obligated to provide services to those clients until a different provider can be found. This could cause cashflow crunches, clinician departures, and ethical complaints for practices that do not make this a top priority to navigate.
Action Steps:
- Audit your current Medicare telehealth patient roster for all clients that may be impacted.
- Notify patients about potential changes to their telehealth eligibility (they have a right to know in advance).
- Design “worse case scenario” plan of how to re-assign / refer / off-board clients ethically.
- Ensure that new clients are assigned to more appropriate providers in case of no changes to policy.
- Look for opportunities to pick up clients and clinicians from practices that have planned poorly for this transition.
Need more help? Reach out to our compliance guru Dr. Wade Fuqua for an individual coaching session or join his monthly compliance Zoom group to brainstorm solutions.
Mental Health Tech Integration: AI and Practice Management Evolve Beyond Note Taking
The Big Story: The mental health software market is rapidly evolving with AI-powered features, improved telehealth integration, and more robust practice management systems. The U.S. behavioral health EHR market is forecasted to reach $500+ million by 2030.
Trending Features in AI Driven Practices:
- AI strategy mindset and planning – Practices that develop pro-active AI planning and integration teams are leading the way and gaining market share and clinicians from practices that reactively implementing AI to play catch-up.
- Marketing is top priority – The healthiest practices are focusing on tools to automate and streamline marketing like Apollo.Io, ZoomInfo, GoHighLevel, Constant Contact, etc.
- Dashboards and AI-driven compliance – Practices are using tool like Practice Vital to dashboard practice stats, Bastion to audit notes and analyze sensitive data, etc.
Why It Matters to You: The right practice management software can save you 5-10 hours per week on administrative tasks per administrative staff person. This has the potential to increase profit margins and discretionary cash flow for practices WITHOUT having to cut clinician pay.
Actions Step: You need to do an AI-readiness assessment on your practice. You can easily do this by using ChatGPT claude itself with the following prompt: “Act as a HIPAA-compliant AI implementation consultant and ask me a series of detailed questions to analyze our practice’s AI readiness. Then make recommendations on use cases designed to decrease our cost, workload, and burnout, while also increasing our clinical effectiveness and practice culture.”
📚 Recommendations of the Week for Practice Owners
1. New Release: Profit First for Therapists: A Simple Framework for Financial Freedom
- Herres, Julie (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 180 Pages - 10/21/2025 (Publication Date) - Greenoak Press (Publisher)
Why You Need This: This is the new profitability workbook from Julie Herres is the Founder of Green Oak Accounting, which specializes in bookkeeping, tax and financial advisory services for practice owners. She’s a badass, no BS accountant who helps practice owners get their practices to financial healthy spots.
Perfect For: Anyone with profitability below 20% and any solo and group practice owners who feel like they are working too hard and not keeping enough of what they bring in.
Reviewer Quote: “This book is an absolute must for growing a private practice! It’s so much more detailed than any other practice-building book I’ve seen.”
2. Optery Privacy Services – Reduce risk of clients finding you on the internet!
Why You Need This: As a healthcare provider, your home address, phone number, and family details are likely exposed on hundreds of data broker sites—making it easy for patients or anyone else to find you outside the clinic. This is not only a privacy risk, but a safety risk for many therapists due to disgruntled clients, political targeting, etc.
Included features in their $3.99/mo plan:
- Automated removals from 365+ Sites
- Monthly automated scans and removal
- Opt Out Progress and Exposure Risk Reporting
- Automatically Opt Out of Newly Supported Data Brokers
3. Holiday Gift for Therapists (or Yourself!) – Don’t Make Me Use My Therapy Voice!
- Dual wall insulated: keeps beverages hot or cold
- Stainless Steel, BPA Free
- Leak proof lid with clear slider
Why You Need This: Easy gift idea for the other therapists in your world… $20-ish depending on manufactured and you can fill with goodies like candy, a gift card, etc.
📬 What’s on Your Mind?
What challenges are you facing in your practice right now? Which of these headlines impacted you most? Drop a comment below and let’s discuss!
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Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. All recommendations are based on genuine value to mental health practice owners.
