Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Dwayne Stevens · WestCare Foundation · August 2026
In behavioral health, people arrive through other people. In this market, first contact with a new referral source usually happens through relationships a team already holds: a hospital social worker someone knows, a court coordinator someone worked with, a health plan contact from a prior contract. That reaches the part of the referral market that overlaps a team's own history, and it is silent about the rest. This map is the rest, across the United States. The organizations that decide where a person goes next, who inside them makes that call, and roughly how many of each are on public record. It is a business to business map only. Nothing in it touches patients.
Hospitals and health systems
Where the highest-acuity referrals start. Discharge runs to a deadline, so the placement call is made under time pressure by people who reuse whoever they can reach that day.
Who decides: director of case management, discharge planner, clinical social work manager, emergency department care coordinator.
13,000 to 13,500
US organizations registered as general acute care hospitals
Community mental health and behavioral health clinics
The largest single segment by count and the one where placement decisions are made every day rather than at contract renewal. Access is clinical, and it is built person by person.
Who decides: clinical director, intake and access coordinator, care coordination lead, medical director.
29,000 to 30,000
US organizations registered as mental health clinics, including community mental health centers
Federally qualified health centers and community clinics
Primary care that carries behavioral health need it cannot always hold. Integrated care models put the referral decision next to the exam room rather than in a separate department.
Who decides: chief clinical officer, behavioral health director, care coordination lead, chief medical officer.
17,000 to 17,500
US organizations registered as federally qualified health centers
Substance use treatment providers
The segment most often read as competition and most often working as a partner, because level of care moves in both directions and no single provider covers the whole continuum.
Who decides: clinical director, admissions and placement lead, utilization review manager.
16,500 to 17,500
US organizations registered as substance use rehabilitation facilities or substance use disorder rehabilitation clinics, combined
Veterans and military health
Small by count and unusually concentrated. One community care office can route a whole region, and the seats are stable enough that a relationship built once tends to hold.
Who decides: community care office staff, VA social workers, transition and readjustment counselors, military family support coordinators.
roughly 2,000
US clinics registered as Veterans Affairs or military outpatient facilities
Employers and benefits leaders
The route into care that starts before a crisis. It is the slowest segment to open and the least contested, because access here runs through benefits and employee assistance rather than through clinical relationships.
Who decides: VP of benefits, employee assistance manager, HR director, occupational health lead.
11,000 to 11,500
US employers with 1,000 or more people on a filed benefit plan; roughly 143,000 file a large plan at any size
Courts, probation and reentry
Consistently the highest-volume single referral relationship in this field, and the one that is hardest to reach at scale, because it is organized county by county rather than nationally.
Who decides: drug court coordinator, probation supervisor, reentry and diversion program manager, public defender social worker.
Not published as one register
drug courts, probation departments and diversion programs sit at county and state level, so this segment is built county by county rather than bought as a list

Where the openings are

1
The five clinical segments above come to roughly 77,500 to 80,500 registered organizations. That is the countable part of the referral market across the United States. A relationship-led channel reaches whichever slice of it already overlaps the people a team has worked with. The rest is rarely unwilling, most of it simply does not know the program is there.
2
The decision sits with a role, not with an organization. Case managers, intake coordinators and court staff move often, and a new one rebuilds a placement list from whoever reaches them first. A channel built on named roles catches that moment. A relationship-led channel hears about it after the pattern has already set.
3
The employer route is the one almost nobody in this field works. Benefits and employee assistance leaders decide where a workforce goes for help, they are used to being contacted directly, and the segment sits at a scale that a named-account channel can cover. It is also the furthest removed from anything a clinical referral relationship already reaches.
4
This is referral-source development, not patient acquisition. Everything above is an organization and a role. Federal and state law puts hard limits on anything paid per referral in this field, so the only version that works is a fixed program that develops named sources. That constraint narrows the field of firms willing to do it properly, which is part of why the segments stay open.
Built from public federal registry data: healthcare organization registrations current to the July 2026 national file, and employer benefit plan filings for the 2024 filing year. Counts are banded deliberately. A registration is a filing for a site, not always a distinct organization, so multi-site systems appear more than once. Owner-only and very small employers do not file, so the employer figures describe established payrolls rather than the whole market. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
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