The Centerstone and Brightli merger marked one of the largest behavioral health transactions of 2025. With an anticipated $1 billion in combined annual revenue and a joint workforce of nearly 10,300 across 360 locations, it also makes the new entity possibly the largest nonprofit in the sector.
Dr. C.J. Davis, CEO-elect of the unified organization, will take the reins of the new behavioral health giant one year from now, succeeding current CEO David Guth. The behavioral health C-suite is not a new place for Davis, who has spent much of his career in CEO positions at mental health and psychology practices.
He spent nearly four years as the CEO of Brightli before the merger, eight years as CEO of Burrell Behavioral Health and six years as CEO of 4C Health in Logansport, Indiana.
Still, being at the helm of an organization this size and at this point in time will be a new challenge for Davis., he told Behavioral Health Business, which is an “inflection point for behavioral health.”
“What we’re putting in place is really the framework for something that sustains for a long time to come and has the potential to impact thousands and thousands of both existing lives and new lives,” Davis said. “So I think the legacy of the organization will be essentially that we have the ability to do something really special in an industry that’s waiting for a partnership like this.”
To soon lead one of the largest nonprofit organizations in the mental health sector, against the backdrop of layoffs, slower dealmaking across the industry, ongoing staffing woes and uncertainty across the federal landscape, is a massive undertaking. It is one that Davis hopes will have a lasting, positive impact across the field.
“We’re sitting on what we believe to be a real tipping point in behavioral health and an opportunity to have a huge impact, not just on the people we serve, but potentially on the industry of behavioral health,” Davis said.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Behavioral Health Business: Since we last spoke, you’ve become the CEO-elect of this new giant behavioral health nonprofit. How do you feel about stepping into this position?
Davis: I feel really good at the moment. We have such a tremendous opportunity with two large organizations coming together. The real name of the game at this point is, how do we integrate the corporate offices? How do we address quality? What is going to be our strategic plan moving forward?
There’s a lot of blocking and tackling that has to happen at this stage of the partnership and affiliation, but there’s also those moments that we’re already starting to dream about what we can accomplish together and the impact that we’ll have on our respective communities. The work has just started. It’s so interesting. You work up to a partnership of this magnitude, and you think of a big sigh of relief for about five seconds and then the real work starts.
What are some of those dreams and maybe loftier or long-term goals that you have for a partnership of this magnitude?
Davis: When I think about some of the opportunities to dream, I think of multiple buckets, but first and foremost is access and how you make care more convenient. I think that has to be one of the central focuses of our partnership, if you think about how behavioral health models were built, they weren’t really built on what people needed. What they needed 30 years ago is not what they need today. They need convenience. They need seamless care, coordinated care. I think really addressing the access challenges that we all face will be important.
The other piece, if I were to say bucket number two, is how do we address age-old research problems in our industry? How do we get more cutting-edge research and technology integrations to create the kind of outcomes that we can then push to payers and lawmakers and other places in our country?
I’d really love to see a situation where we’re the research leader and we really try to advance the science of delivery systems. I think our industry is really waiting for somebody to be that person.
Number three would be there are a lot of virtual technology integration pieces in terms of how we provide better care over either a virtual network or through the use of technology.
A close number four is how do we tackle workforce challenges? We know that between now and 2036, demand is going up, and the number of providers is going down. We have found that over the course of growing organically at both respective organizations, the bigger you get, the more attention you have, and the more people you attract. They’re interested in being part of your organization.
I personally believe the ability for us to be a research leader on the cutting edge of science will be a real attraction for a lot of providers, so we’re very anxious and excited to see what that means for us.
Then bucket number five would be, how do you integrate care across different service lines? I think those are four or five things that I think we’re already starting to imagine what this new world is going to look like as we continue to evolve and grow.
You mentioned that this is really happening at what you believe to be a tipping point in behavioral health. Talk a little bit about that. What do you see as the tipping point, and how will this organization address that?
Davis: I think tipping point, because really, our industry has never encountered an organization that has this much size but this much capability.
We have wrestled with age-old research questions in our industry for years that have never been solved. For example, how long should a service be? What is the optimal number of sessions for an individual to get better? How do you create seamless, coordinated care? How do you integrate AI services into your care to create predictive modeling? What’s the evidence to improve people’s lives on the clinical side?
All of these questions have been circulating for years. We know it takes 15 years for research to make its way into practice. We hope to eliminate that gap.
When you talk about those elements of the service delivery system, they can be really important Rubik’s cubes to solve in terms of how we move the needle on outcomes. Then, as you think about those outcomes, really, what you’re looking at is, how do we take our outcomes and publish them in such a way that people – important people, stakeholders, clients – understand what happens when people come through our doors.
I think that’s going to be the real difference: how are we advancing the ball around these research questions? How are we advancing the ball down the field on the development of better evidence-based practices for people? Then, how do we push that information to the right decision-makers in our country?
What are the major milestones you hope to reach within the first 24 months of your leadership over the newly merged entity?
Davis: The first part is to integrate the two organizations within the first year. We know that integration efforts are a heavy lift, but we understand that it takes time. Included in those integration efforts is to make sure that we have cultural alignment.
The second piece, outside of integration and change management, is to start to publish and create what our strategy is going to be nationally. Where are emerging markets? And how do we take our business plan, know-how and strategy and apply those to the emerging markets?
We’re pretty unique in that we have three major provider types. We’re the largest CCBHC in the country, and an addiction provider. We’re a federally qualified health center across multiple states and we’re also an IDD provider. So, figuring out how we can take those pages of the playbook and apply them to emerging markets will be really important.
Then, how do we further our partnerships with local communities, stakeholders like the federal government, and be a resource for them to help fix problems and solve problems?
You’re taking the helm of this organization of such size at a time when some science-backed mental health practices like SSRI prescribing, youth mental health screenings and other traditional modalities across the field are under a lot of scrutiny from the current federal administration. Against that backdrop, how will that affect Centerstone’s strategy or care delivery, if at all?
Davis: There are certain mainstays of our industry and new emerging science and technologies that are critical for us to advance and continue to address. For example, measurement-informed care. It’s really important that people understand precisely what happens to them and what they experience, and how we monitor care and how care is being delivered, how people improve. I don’t think that is going to go away. In fact, I think that’s going to be radically enhanced and enriched.
We need to have more interface with people between the ages of 12 and 15, before chronic mental health conditions evolve, so that we’re working upstream in terms of the scrutiny around medications. We understand that our medications are safe practices. We understand that the evolution of psychotropics has evolved over the course of time. If there are instances where groups start to scrutinize some of the practices, it’s our job to make sure that we’re producing the right kind of research to ensure that the practices we’re using are making a difference.
Most of the time, what happens in community mental health is we’re not doing a good enough job publishing our data and our outcomes to share with the right people so they can understand what that data really means for them in terms of administrative and policy changes.
I think it’s our responsibility to help the administration, no matter what side of the aisle they are on or what questions they’re asking; it’s our job to be able to produce and create the right pieces of data. So when people make decisions on things like psychotropic medications or whatever the issue may be, that it is being done with informed data that is helpful in the decision-making.
What do you see as the biggest risks and what are some of the biggest opportunities for Centerstone over the next five years?
Davis: How do we scale our organization in such a way that we can make profound impacts across a large footprint, if not the country? That’s the opportunity that’s in front of us. How can we execute on that and share those results and accomplishments with the rest of the country in terms of knowing what works and what doesn’t work?
In terms of risk? At this particular point in time, we don’t really look at the affiliation with concerns about risks. We really see more opportunities. As you get bigger, people have higher expectations of you as an organization, and now we have to execute on those expectations.
One risk would be, if we sit back here and in five years from now say, we had the opportunity at our scale and size to make an impact, and we didn’t follow through on that impact. At this particular point in time, there are a lot of eyes on us. We welcome those eyes. We look forward to the pressure, but we also understand that now it’s the opportunity we have to execute.
Since you are now an organization of such scale, do you want to differentiate anything in the field or make any changes or that you hope that other providers may follow in practice?
Davis: It’s going to remain to be seen what sorts of opportunities we will have as a result of what we’re seeing. We understand that this is a historic moment that is not lost on us. We take that responsibility extremely seriously.
I think the opportunities are yet to be determined in terms of where we are going to go in the country. In the nine states that we’re in and the market that we have right now – a national, clinically integrated market – I think we’re going to have the ability to form large-scale partnerships across large geographic regions. That should be pretty exciting in the future.
What kind of legacy do you personally hope this merger and your leadership will have on the behavioral health industry at large?
Davis: This partnership has such an opportunity that’s bigger than any one person. It’s about an army of people really committed to a mission – a mission that’s so important in how it changes and saves lives. That is what we’re putting in place: the framework for something that sustains for a long time to come and has the potential to impact thousands and thousands of both existing lives and new lives.
I think the legacy of the organizations will be essentially that we have the ability to do something really special in an industry that’s waiting for a partnership like this.