How Valant — a leading outpatient behavioral health EMR — expanded into the Intensive Outpatient and Partial Hospitalization market, opened a $2B+ opportunity, and built the clinical, billing, and go-to-market foundation to compete and win in an entirely new vertical.
The Situation
Valant had established itself as a strong outpatient behavioral health EMR — spending 17 years building deep expertise in outpatient care. But a significant and growing portion of the market — Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP) and Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHP) — operated at a higher level of care that Valant's platform simply could not support. There was no IOP/PHP capability in the product at all.
The pressure was converging from three directions simultaneously: existing Valant customers were expanding into IOP/PHP levels of care and hitting a wall, competitors were actively winning IOP/PHP deals that Valant couldn't even bid on, and the market research pointed to a $2B+ opportunity that was being left entirely on the table.
The opportunity: This was not just a feature gap — it was a strategic market expansion. IOP and PHP operate under fundamentally different clinical workflows, authorization requirements, billing logic, and documentation standards than outpatient care. Building for this vertical meant building a new product layer, not adding a setting.
The Challenge
The clinical, operational, and billing differences between outpatient and IOP/PHP care are significant. Getting this wrong would not just mean a poor product — it would mean compliance failures and payer claim rejections for customers in a high-acuity setting.
The Approach
With a compressed timeline and a vertical that required building both product depth and market knowledge from the ground up, the approach ran product delivery and GTM enablement as parallel workstreams rather than sequential ones. You cannot launch a new vertical without both.
Market research, customer interviews, competitor analysis, C-suite presentations, IOP/PHP clinical workflow mapping and payer documentation research
Scoped clinical modules, billing logic, utilization review, and authorization workflows; defined what had to ship vs. what could follow
Agile delivery of charting, utilization review, authorization rules, and institutional billing modules with cross-functional team
Full go-to-market execution: traveled for corporate internal training, and assisted in or developed many internal/external videos, knowledge articles, and sales enablement assets
The product was built as six core modules serving all three user groups — clinicians, billing staff, and practice administrators:
IOP/PHP Charting
Group and individual therapy documentation workflows purpose-built for IOP and PHP levels of care, supporting group patients individual attendance, start and end times, and mid exits with auto calculating the attendance duration for clinical note requirements and utilization review.
Utilization Review
End-to-end utilization review workflows enabling all staff to view patients calculated attendance, authorization details and expirations, and dates to reauthorize and produce mid program review to payer. Supports documenting medical necessity, tracking authorization status, and maintaining payer documentation integrity across the episode of care.
Authorization Rules
Payer-specific authorization management with ongoing usage tracking, expiration alerts, and compliance checkpoints built into the clinical workflow.
Institutional Billing (UB-04 / 837I)
Implemented institutional claim submission — a fundamentally different billing model from outpatient professional claims.
Level of Care Patient Tracking
Patient tracking across levels of care including outside care coordination and reporting, giving clinical and administrative staff full visibility into the patient's care journey within and prior the program.
Mid-Program Payer Reporting
Seamless, pre-populated mid-program payer reporting designed to reduce administrative burden, support ongoing authorization, and meet payer documentation requirements without manual data entry or assembly.
The go-to-market was equally comprehensive. Launching a new vertical means nothing if the sales team cannot sell it and customers cannot use it. The GTM effort was the other half of this project:
In-Person and Live Internal Trainings
Traveled to deliver hands-on internal training educating the sales and customer success teams on what IOP and PHP actually are — the clinical model, the patient population, the payer environment, and how to position Valant in this space.
External Training Videos
Co-produced customer-facing video content covering IOP/PHP workflows, feature walkthroughs, and billing guidance — enabling practices to onboard and train their own staff independently.
Articles & Documentation
Co-authored customer-facing articles, knowledge base content, and clinical workflow documentation establishing Valant as a credible voice in the IOP/PHP space.
Sales Enablement
Built demo scripts, buyer qualification checklists, and competitive positioning materials that allowed the sales team to enter IOP/PHP conversations with confidence and close faster.
C-Suite Presentations
Delivered Product Council presentations to the CEO synthesizing market trends, competitive gap analysis, ROI, and three-tier build out suggestions on multiple features — securing alignment and investment before and after launch.
The Outcomes
The IOP/PHP launch gave Valant a product it had never had and a market it had never been able to enter. The combination of deep product work and comprehensive GTM enablement meant the team could win deals from day one.
Reflection
“The biggest risk in a vertical expansion is shipping the product and assuming the market will figure it out. IOP and PHP are specialized enough that nobody — not the sales team, not new customers, not even experienced clinicians switching platforms — can just pick it up without guidance. The GTM effort was not a nice-to-have. It was half the product. Building both in parallel, under the same ownership, is what made this launch work.”
This project reinforced that a successful vertical expansion requires a product manager who understands the clinical and operational domain deeply enough to educate others. The in-person trainings, the videos, the articles — those were not marketing deliverables. They were product deliverables. Without them, the features would have existed but the vertical would not have landed.