Behavioral Health Program Manager

Role overview

The Behavioral Health Program Manager is responsible for shaping, launching, coordinating, and continuously improving behavioral health programs and the department’s daily operations. The role blends program oversight, operational coordination, reporting, and administrative leadership to strengthen patient access, care quality, service-line results, and provider experience.

This position partners with both internal leadership and outside stakeholders to build practical workflows, policies, procedures, tracking measures, and reporting tools that help behavioral health services run effectively.

Core duties

• Oversee the everyday functioning of behavioral health services, including planning, reporting, project coordination, and administrative support.
• Create, update, and improve operating systems, workflows, procedures, forms, and standards used across behavioral health programs.
• Review clinical, operational, and performance information to spot patterns, service gaps, and improvement opportunities.
• Monitor and summarize key indicators tied to access, quality, patient experience, provider productivity, capacity, and continuity of care.
• Help design and roll out new programs, initiatives, policies, software tools, and process enhancements.
• Work closely with clinical, operational, and senior leaders to coordinate projects, share updates, and support decisions.
• Prepare meeting agendas, reports, presentations, correspondence, workflows, and other departmental documents.
• Lead meetings when needed, track follow-up actions, and represent the department in assigned forums.
• Support behavioral health scheduling, outreach, patient follow-up, and other administrative patient-service tasks as required.
• Check that operations align with internal policies, regulatory expectations, and accreditation standards.
• Coach team members on operational processes, tools, and program requirements, and act as a subject matter resource.
• Assist with recruiting and onboarding behavioral health providers.
• Provide supervision, training, evaluation, and functional guidance to designated staff members or coordinators when assigned.
• Carry out additional duties as needed; responsibilities may shift as organizational priorities change.

Education and experience

A bachelor’s degree or higher in behavioral health, healthcare administration, public health, business administration, or a closely related area is required.

Preferred background includes 3 years of experience in healthcare, clinical operations, program management, or administrative work, ideally in a behavioral health or mental health environment, plus 1 year of experience using EMR/EHR systems and healthcare data platforms.

Additional information

This role is intended to describe the overall nature and level of work, rather than list every possible task or skill. Duties may be modified as business needs evolve.