BEHAVIORAL HEALTH COMPLIANCE & OPERATIONS
Building in-house behavioral health systems that protect, produce, and pass survey.
Sentinel Health Advisory Group serves post-acute care providers, long term care operators, primary care practices, and existing behavioral health programs across three core areas: in-house behavioral health program implementation, independent auditing of third party behavioral health vendors, and psychotropic compliance technology through the Sentinel GDR Tracker © . Every engagement is built to be clinically excellent, financially sustainable, and CMS survey-ready.
CMS F740–F758 Compliance
Medicare Part A & B Billing
AHCA & DCF Regulatory Expertise
Involuntary Hold Navigation
GDR & Antipsychotic Stewardship including the Sentinel GDR Tracker ©
OUR APPROACH
Strategy that makes clinical practice thrive
We advise on program design, staffing models, regulatory alignment, billing workflows, third party vendor performance, and psychotropic compliance tracking. Not clinical practice, but the operational architecture around it. Every engagement begins with what your organization already has: your census, your citations, your documentation, your vendors, and your existing staff.
From there we build the system that turns behavioral health from a compliance liability into a clinically sound, revenue positive service line owned by your organization.
OUR SERVICES
Expert advisory across every dimension of behavioral health
Program Design & Launch
In-house behavioral health programs built from the ground up. Staffing models, credentialing, IDT integration, policy frameworks, and documentation workflows.
Clinician Credentialing
Enrolling PMHNPs, LCSWs, LMFTs, and LMHCs as Medicare providers, including expanded eligibility under CAA 2023 §4121.
Vendor Auditing
When behavioral health is delivered by a third party, the citations, the documentation gaps, and the survey exposure still land on your license. Sentinel provides independent, conflict free audits of your behavioral health vendors: clinical documentation quality, regulatory alignment, billing integrity, and contract performance.
GDR & Antipsychotic Stewardship
We design and operationalize gradual dose reduction programs that satisfy F758, improve your CMS Five Star rating, and reduce census risk driven by antipsychotic quality measures without destabilizing residents.We also have developed the Sentinel GDR Tracker © as purpose built app that automates psychotropic stewardship across your census. Every psychotropic. Every GDR clock. Every resident. One dashboard.
Billing Optimization
Capture legitimate Medicare Part B revenue from behavioral health CPT codes, consolidated billing exclusions, modifiers, POS codes, and compliant claims.
PDPM & MDS Accuracy
Stronger documentation in MDS Sections B, C, D, and E drives accurate acuity classification and improved PDPM per diem.
BY THE NUMBERS
The business case for getting this right
$5K+
Saved per avoidable hospitalization prevented
75%
Medicare Part B rate for LCSWs, LMFTs & LMHCs
F740
Attaches to your facility, not your contractor
WHY IN-HOUSE
Contracted behavioral health leaves your facility exposed
Contracted clinicians visit once or twice a week. Crises don't keep that schedule. Neither do surveyors.
Daily crisis response on-site
A licensed clinician can assess, document, and act before a behavioral escalation becomes a hospitalization.
Full IDT integration and care planning
Your clinician attends weekly interdisciplinary team meetings and contributes directly to resident care plans. Contractors rarely do.
In-House vs. Contracted
How the two models compare across what matters most.
Daily on-site availability
IN-HOUSE ✔
IDT meeting attendance
IN-HOUSE ✔
Involuntary BH hold navigation
IN-HOUSE ✔
GDR program ownership
IN-HOUSE ✔
Direct MDS documentation
IN-HOUSE ✔
Survey liability stays with the SNF
BOTH MODELS
BILLING INTELLIGENCE
Secure your earned value.
Don't leave significant Medicare Part B behavioral health revenue on the table. We show your team what to bill, how to code it, and how to document it compliantly from individual psychotherapy to psychological testing, medication management, and crisis codes.
Client Reviews
“We'd been told for two years behavioral health wasn't feasible for a building our size. Sentinel walked in, started with our actual census and our actual citations, and had a working program with billing live inside of a quarter. It's now one of our strongest service lines”.
— Current Customer“Our behavioral health vendor had been in the building for three years and no one had ever checked their documentation against what a surveyor would ask for. Sentinel's audit found gaps we would have paid for at our next survey. The vendor conversation that followed was uncomfortable and completely necessary”.
— Former Customer“Before the tracker, GDR clocks lived in a spreadsheet that was accurate on the day someone updated it and wrong every day after. Now my DON pulls the whole psychotropic census in one screen, and when the surveyor asked for our GDR documentation, we printed it on the spot.”
— Current Customer
Frequently Asked Questions
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No, and that's deliberate. We are not a staffing company or a management services organization, and we don't place providers in your building. We design and implement the operational architecture around clinical care: program structure, staffing models, regulatory alignment, billing workflows, and compliance tracking. Because we have no staffing revenue to protect, our advice has no conflict of interest built into it.
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Because the liability never left with the contract. When a vendor's documentation falls short, the citation lands on your license, not theirs. We provide independent audits of vendor documentation quality, regulatory alignment, billing integrity, and contract performance. Sometimes the result is a corrective conversation with your vendor. Sometimes it's confirmation that they're doing good work. Either way, you'll know before a surveyor does.
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The Sentinel GDR Tracker © is a purpose-built app that automates psychotropic stewardship across your census and IDT ready reporting. It's built for DONs, unit managers, and consultant pharmacist workflows in skilled nursing and long term care settings, where F758 remains one of the most cited deficiencies in the survey process.
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Every engagement starts with what you already have: your census, your citations, your documentation, your vendors, and your existing staff. From there we scope the work to your situation, whether that's building a new in-house program, auditing a vendor relationship, or strengthening a program already in place. Deliverables are operational, not theoretical. You get workflows, forms, billing codes, and named owners, not a strategy deck. Our pricing is flat-rate, so you know the cost before we start.
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We serve post-acute care providers, long-term care operators, primary care practices, and existing behavioral health programs. That includes single-facility operators and multi-facility groups. Our team brings decades of nursing, regulatory, and operations leadership experience in these exact settings, so we're not learning your world on your invoice.
A 30-minute consultation is enough to identify where your current model is exposed, whether the fix is bringing the program in-house, holding your vendor accountable, or getting your psychotropic tracking survey ready.