Elevate 2026: The Room I Won’t Forget 

A moment from our recent customer conference, Elevate, keeps coming back to me. Late on day two, near one of the firepits in the courtyard, two leaders who had never met before were comparing notes on the documentation crisis that was costing them both clinicians. They had nothing to sell each other, they were just helping each other. 

That scene played out, in different forms, in every corner of our first customer conference. Over 300 behavioral health leaders gathered for three days, and the energy in the room had a generosity to it you can’t manufacture. Leaders sat on stages and shared the hard truths about what it takes to run an organization right now, and they kept doing it around the firepits, in the workshops, and in the hallway conversations. 

This part of our industry doesn’t always show up in operations meetings, therapy sessions, or in the trade press, but it’s what sets behavioral health apart, and it’s why we at Kipu think of behavioral health as a community, not an industry or market segment. The people who do this work often don’t see each other as competitors, but as fellow travelers in a job that, on most days, almost no one else fully understands. 

That matters more now than it has in a long time, because the moment we’re in is harder than the industry has faced in years. Payer contracts have been cut, sometimes by half, and Medicaid reductions are landing in states with real consequences. Denials and eligibility churn keep climbing while a behavioral health professional shortage now stretches across 150 million Americans. And, of the 50 million people who need substance use disorder treatment this year, only about 15 percent will seek it.  

Operators are running their organizations against all of that every single day, and most of them are doing it without a peer next door who can walk in and say here’s what worked for me. 

The substance of what was shared at Elevate was remarkable. Leaders walked through how they’re deploying AI to give clinicians their evenings back and keep them in the field, and how they’re rebuilding the front door of their organizations to catch the demographics and payer details that decide whether a claim ever gets paid. They talked about revenue cycle as a discipline the whole executive team has to share, and about culture as something leaders have to carry intentionally into every new site they open.  

Every one of those ideas came out of operators talking to each other, comparing notes, and admitting where they were still figuring things out. 

What I carry home from Elevate is the conviction that the next era of behavioral health is being built right here, by this community. The leaders who came to that room, the teams they came home to lead, and the patients those organizations serve are the ones building it together, and being part of that is a bigger privilege than any quarter or any deal. 

I closed my keynote by asking the room to imagine a future where the burden is finally out of the way, where the tools do the work tools are meant to do, where revenue reflects the care delivered rather than just what got through the payers, and where patients are supported every step of the way.  

That future is being built right now, by all of you. Onward together. 

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About the Authors

Carina Edwards CEO of Kipu Health, the technology partner for mental health and addiction service providers. Carina is an experienced healthcare technology executive with a proven track record of innovative and dynamic leadership in establishing, growing, and operating private and public companies. Prior to Kipu, she served as the CEO of Quil, a pioneering joint venture between Comcast NBCUniversal and Independence Blue Cross. Prior to Quil, Edwards was an executive at Imprivata, where she played a key role in the company's growth and built an award-winning customer experience organization.