National Director of Mental Health Clinical Excellence

Thrive Therapies Group•Nashville, TN

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

Thrive Therapies Group is a tech-enabled pediatric healthcare company delivering specialized clinical care to children with disabilities and those facing barriers to access. We deliver our care where it changes outcomes fastest — inside the schools and districts where children spend their days — partnering directly with district leaders to integrate evidence-based services into the school day. Every clinician under our banner is part of a unified clinical model, accountable to a single national standard of care, working from a shared platform built specifically for the children we serve. At the center of our model is Thrive Clinical, our purpose-built EHR designed from the ground up for pediatric clinical care in school settings. Thrive Clinical is not a generic documentation platform retrofitted for schools. It was built to track student progress, measure symptom reduction and functional gains, capture rich clinical data, and give providers and leaders real-time insight into whether kids are actually getting better. It is the operational backbone of everything we do, and it gets smarter as the clinicians and leaders using it push it forward. We are growing rapidly because the need is staggering and largely unmet. Across the country, children are experiencing anxiety, depression, trauma, and behavioral crises with no clear path to care inside their schools. Districts are overwhelmed, referral pipelines are broken, and the clinicians who could help are stretched too thin or trained in approaches that were never built for this population or this setting. We are building the alternative: a clinically excellent, technology-enabled mental health model designed to scale without compromising the depth or quality of care any individual child receives. The National Director of Mental Health Clinical Excellence Clinical Excellence is the architect of that standard.

Requirements

Full, unrestricted LCSW licensure; LMSW, LSW, or pre-licensed candidates will not be considered
Active licensure in Tennessee or a relevant state of practice; multi-state licensure costs supported upon hire
Minimum 10 years of clinical experience in school-based, pediatric, or community mental health settings with significant involvement in diagnosis, treatment planning, and direct clinical care
Minimum 5 years of progressive clinical leadership experience, with at least 3 years in a multi-site or multi-state clinical leadership role
Demonstrated experience building diagnostic standards, evaluation frameworks, or quality systems at scale — not just running them. You will be asked to share artifacts (handbooks, frameworks, protocols, playbooks) you have authored
Demonstrated experience building clinical programs, supervision frameworks, or quality systems at scale — not just running them. You will be asked to share artifacts (handbooks, frameworks, dashboards, playbooks) you have authored
Demonstrated experience formally supervising clinical leaders or supervisors, not just direct clinicians
Working fluency in insurance billing for mental health services, including Medicaid, commercial payers, and school-based funding streams; familiarity with CPT coding, prior authorization, claims adjudication, and payer credentialing requirements across multiple states
Working knowledge of HIPAA, FERPA, and state-specific minor consent and confidentiality statutes, with demonstrated ability to research state law variation and translate it into clinical policy and provider-facing protocols
Demonstrated data fluency: comfort reading clinical and operational dashboards and using data to drive decisions
Ability and willingness to travel approximately 50% of the month across assigned national markets

Nice To Haves

Additional licensure or certification in a specialized modality (certified TF-CBT therapist, DBT-Linehan Board of Certification, EMDR certification, or similar)
Experience scaling mental health operations across multiple districts, states, or organizational contexts
Prior experience as a clinical leader or clinical champion at a healthtech or edtech company with a proprietary clinical platform
Experience working in or alongside venture-backed or high-growth healthcare or education services organizations
Fluency in a global language (Spanish, Somali, Arabic, or others)

Responsibilities

Set and Own the National Clinical Standard for Mental Health: Define Thrive's national framework for psychoeducational assessment and eligibility determination, setting the standard for how school psychologists across every market select instruments, conduct evaluations, and document findings. Build and maintain the clinical frameworks, treatment protocols, supervision standards, and modality-specific practice guidelines that Clinical Supervisors implement with their supervisee populations across all regions. Ensure that what excellent mental health care looks like at Thrive is documented, measurable, and consistently applied regardless of geography, district, or state. Establish Thrive’s approach to clinical diagnosis and treatment planning, ensuring that providers are conducting thorough biopsychosocial assessments, applying DSM-5-TR criteria accurately, and building individualized, evidence-based treatment plans for every student on their caseload. Ensure that Thrive's diagnostic standards account for the full range of student backgrounds, including English language learners, students with complex or co-occurring profiles, and students from diverse cultural and linguistic communities.
Lead and Develop Clinical Supervisors Nationally: Serve as the direct clinical authority above Clinical Supervisors, who deliver high-touch supervision to pre-licensed LCSWs, clinical social work residents, and performance-flagged providers across assigned national markets. Build the supervision model that scales from one Clinical Supervisor today to a national team across dozens of markets in two years — including hiring criteria, supervisor onboarding, the supervisor playbook, and the cadence that holds them accountable. Set the coaching agenda nationally: your Clinical Supervisors implement your standards, and you ensure they have the frameworks, tools, and direction to do that consistently whether they are in Tennessee, Washington, Florida, or any market we expand into. Coach the coaches: build your Clinical Supervisor layer as your most important product, owning their development, succession planning, and bench. Make readiness and advancement decisions in collaboration with Clinical Supervisors and regional leads using Thrive Clinical data and the structured performance criteria you define.
Drive Thrive Clinical Adoption, Fidelity, and Evolution: Own Thrive Clinical as the operational expression of the national diagnostic model: set the standards for how it is used, what it measures, and how its data informs clinical decisions at every level of the organization. Establish the platform benchmarks Clinical Supervisors and providers are held to, and use system-wide data to identify where the standard is holding and where it is not across all markets. Partner directly with product and engineering as the named clinical owner for defined areas of the roadmap, bringing the frontline clinical insight that shapes how the platform evolves to support diagnosis, treatment planning, progress monitoring, and crisis documentation in school settings. Champion Thrive Clinical not as a documentation tool but as a strategic asset for innovation, using its data to surface clinical patterns, raise the bar, and identify what is possible in school-based mental health care.
Protect Clinical Quality at National Scale: Monitor clinical compliance, treatment plan fidelity, session quality, risk documentation standards, and IEP-related mental health service delivery across all mental health markets nationally. Build the early-warning systems that surface quality risk — including elevated caseload acuity, lapses in crisis protocol, or declining symptom trajectories — before they become quality failures, and escalate proactively. Own the clinical risk and safety framework for Thrive’s mental health discipline, ensuring that crisis response protocols, mandated reporting procedures, and safety planning standards are consistent, documented, and practiced across every site. Own the multi-state regulatory landscape for mental health clinical operations, partnering with operations and billing on insurance credentialing, Medicaid enrollment and compliance, commercial payer requirements, and state behavioral health licensing variation.
Lead National Professional Development: Design and drive the PD infrastructure for school psychologists nationally, ensuring content is grounded in Thrive's diagnostic framework and evidence-based practice, not generic continuing education. Build PD that cascades from national standards down through Clinical Supervisors to individual providers, so every clinician at every site is growing in the same clinical direction. Lead summer intensives, site visits, and targeted in-person engagement with partners, supervisors, and providers across all Thrive markets.
Serve as Thrive's Senior School Psychology Voice Nationally: Represent Thrive's school psychology model and diagnostic standards in key district and school partner relationships across the country, communicating the depth and rigor of our approach to evaluation and eligibility. Support onboarding of new national partnerships by establishing clinical expectations early and building the infrastructure to sustain them as Thrive continues to expand. Serve as a thought leader in school-based mental health practice, bringing emerging research, evolving best practices, and a relentless focus on getting care right for every child in every community we serve.