Opus and Circle Health Unite to Protect Revenue and Strengthen Behavioral Health Operations
As reimbursement scrutiny intensifies, the partnership provides behavioral health with a clearer path to align care, documentation, and payment using actionable clinical and financial intelligence.
DENVER, CO, and NEW YORK, NY, October 15, 2026 – Opus and Circle Health today announced a strategic go-to-market partnership that gives behavioral health teams a clearer path to connect fragmented clinical and financial information, gain visibility across operations, and automate the work needed to support care and reimbursement.
The partnership brings together two complementary parts of behavioral health operations. Opus provides the EHR, CRM, and revenue-cycle infrastructure that organizations use to manage care. Circle extends that foundation with documentation, compliance, and authorization automation capabilities, building toward a system of action for healthcare that connects and normalizes information across clinical records, billing systems, claims, insurance contracts, and other disconnected sources into a common operational language.
That shared context helps teams understand how care delivery, payer policy requirements, and financial performance relate. The goal is to give leaders reliable answers and help teams carry out the work those answers require, from preparing authorizations and drafting evidence-backed appeals to addressing documentation and reimbursement gaps.
Together, the companies are focused on a key practical question:
Where are gaps across clinical and financial operations creating more work or lost revenue, and what needs to happen to resolve them?
For behavioral health providers, clinics, and the teams that support them, that question quickly becomes operational. Answering it often means piecing together information from disconnected records, spreadsheets, billing systems, and payer portals. Before determining the next step, staff must reconcile what care was delivered, what was documented, what was authorized, and what was paid.
Connecting and normalizing that disparate information creates a shared view of the patient and the context in which behavioral health providers need to act. Circle keeps that context up to date and uses it to automate more of the follow-through, from gathering supporting evidence for prior authorizations and appeals to coordinating work across clinical and revenue-cycle teams.
Circle’s results to date demonstrate the potential impact of this approach. A behavioral health revenue cycle management team increased the authorized days per review from approximately 3–5 to 7–10. Separately, a Clinic used Circle to analyze a payer pre-payment audit spanning more than 500 pages in under 30 minutes. Together, these outcomes show how Circle can accelerate evidence review and strengthen preparation for authorization and reimbursement decisions.
A higher bar for proving behavioral health care
Pressure on providers is rising as federal and state regulators increase scrutiny of how behavioral health services are authorized and how health plans apply medical-necessity standards. In August 2026, the HHS Office of Inspector General reported that Kansas did not ensure its Medicaid managed care organizations complied with mental health and substance use disorder parity requirements for prior authorization, including by obtaining complete parity analyses. A separate 2026 HHS OIG audit of Pennsylvania’s Community Behavioral Health found that none of 100 sampled denials met all applicable requirements. Effective July 1, 2026, Ohio introduced threshold-based utilization management for specified community behavioral health and SUD services, requiring medical-necessity authorization after defined service limits are reached and updated documentation to support decision-making. In April 2026, the California Department of Managed Health Care reported 39 Knox-Keene Act violations and 22 barriers to behavioral health care across five health plans.
For clinics, these actions translate into direct reimbursement risk. When assessments, treatment plans, progress notes, and authorization requests do not clearly establish medical necessity and continued need, organizations face delayed or denied authorizations, interrupted payment, more appeals, and greater exposure during payer or regulatory review.
“Having operated treatment centers, I understand that delivering high-quality care is only part of the challenge. Providers must also demonstrate, consistently and clearly, why that care should be authorized and reimbursed,” said Humberto Buniotto, CEO of Opus. “Circle addresses that critical gap by adding intelligence around what the clinical record supports and what payors need to see. Together, we have a significant opportunity to strengthen that connection and help providers operate more effectively.”
Turning intelligence into action
Together, Opus and Circle are creating a connected operational foundation that turns clinical and financial data into measurable action across four critical areas:
Connect clinical, billing, business, and payer information to identify gaps between expected and realized revenue, uncover missed charge capture and coding opportunities, and drive follow-through.- Recover Revenue: Connect clinical, billing, business, and payer information to identify gaps between expected and realized revenue, uncover missed charge capture and coding opportunities, and drive follow-through.- Accelerate Utilization Management: Automate manual work across authorization preparation, peer reviews, appeals, and UR tracking, with expanding capabilities to take timely action across portals, phone, and fax workflows.- Strengthen Clinical Quality and Audit Readiness: Automate documentation preparation and compliance review, surface gaps that require attention, and help teams prepare for TJC, CARF, and payor audits.- Turn Answers into Action: Unify clinical and financial information so teams can answer operational questions without repeated manual data pulls and use that context to take the next steps.
This strategy is powered by Circle’s ability to connect and normalize information across EMRs, billing systems, insurance contracts, and other business systems into a common operational language. By keeping that context current and automating the subsequent work, the partnership can help organizations move from identifying a problem to addressing it.
“Behavioral health teams are often asked to prove care using evidence scattered across dozens of notes, assessments, criteria, business, regulatory, and payor requirements,” said Keshav Vasudevan, Co-Founder and CEO of Circle Health. “Circle turns that fragmented context into action. Teams can see what the record supports, strengthen documentation, prepare an authorization, or draft an appeal. Our goal is to make Circle the system of action across clinical and business operations, and our partnership with Opus brings those capabilities directly into the environment where providers already manage care.”
The partnership is active today, with Opus sales, customer success, onboarding, and RCM teams equipped to recognize when customers need support with revenue recovery, authorization preparation, appeals, documentation review, or audit readiness and bring Circle into those conversations. The companies are also exploring deeper technical and workflow integrations that would connect Circle more directly with clinical and financial information managed through Opus, helping teams move from surfacing a documentation, authorization, or revenue gap to taking the appropriate follow-up action with fewer manual handoffs.
About Opus
Opus is the all-in-one EHR, CRM, and revenue cycle management platform purpose-built for substance use disorder and behavioral health treatment providers. Founded by former operators, Opus replaces fragmented systems with a single, integrated solution that spans the full patient lifecycle, from admission through billing and alumni engagement. Opus serves treatment providers across the United States and Canada and is committed to helping its customers deliver world-class care to 4 million patients by 2028. Learn more at opusehr.com.
Learn more: www.opusehr.com
ABOUT CIRCLE HEALTH
Circle Health helps behavioral health and substance use disorder providers automate documentation, compliance review, and authorization work. Working alongside existing EMRs and care-delivery workflows, Circle connects clinical evidence with the requirements used to authorize, audit, and reimburse care. Building on that foundation, Circle provides teams with a unified operating layer that brings clinical, business, and financial information together to support answers, reporting, and action across the organization.
Learn more: circlehealth.co
MEDIA CONTACTS
OpusLiza Mischel, VP, Marketing
lmischel@opusehr.com
CIRCLE HEALTH
Circle Health
Keshav Vasudevan, Co-Founder & CEO
press@circlehealth.co
