Chief Medical Officer (CMO)

Reports To

Chief Executive Officer. Expected member of the Executive Leadership Team.

Location

Candidate may live anywhere in the United States. Monthly Executive Week attendance in West Palm Beach, Florida is required.

Travel

No routine weekly facility travel expectation. Travel is required as needed for facility launches, provider-model implementation, medical instability, regulatory or payer credibility needs, conferences, and occasional grand openings.

Compensation

Target base salary of $400,000-$450,000, with bonus opportunity up to 50% of base tied to growth and profitability. Final details to be discussed with qualified candidates.

Licensure

Must be a board-certified physician with a clean, unrestricted license history and no disciplinary issues that would create risk in multistate licensure. Must be eligible and willing to obtain licenses rapidly in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Arkansas, and Colorado, ideally during the pre-start notice period.

Best Fit

A physician executive operator who can build the medical operating system for a high-growth, multi-state inpatient/residential addiction-treatment platform serving high-acuity Medicaid and safety-net SUD populations.

About Alsos Behavioral Health

Alsos Behavioral Health is building a focused, multi-state inpatient and residential addiction-treatment platform centered on ASAM 3.7 and ASAM 3.5 levels of care. The company is focused on high-acuity substance-use-disorder patients, including Medicaid and safety-net populations that require strong access, sound medical judgment, disciplined operations, and reliable documentation.

Alsos is not trying to become a broad behavioral-health platform. The company is focused on building a repeatable model for launching, stabilizing, and operating inpatient/residential addiction-treatment facilities with strong medical standards, safe access, credible compliance posture, and scalable provider infrastructure.

About the Role

The Chief Medical Officer will be the senior medical operations executive for Alsos. This is not a figurehead physician role, a narrow clinical-policy role, or an academic advisory position. The right candidate must be able to translate medical judgment into operating systems, build and manage provider accountability, support fast admissions decisioning, protect patient safety, improve documentation quality, and partner with a high-velocity executive team.

The center of gravity is medical operations. Provider-model building is a close second. Clinical quality leadership matters, but the role is not designed for a physician who only wants to review standards from a distance. Alsos needs a builder who can design systems, identify implementation risks, create scorecards, inspect whether the system is working, and drive measurable results.

Core Mission

Build and lead Alsos's medical infrastructure so the company can safely admit and treat high-acuity Medicaid and safety-net SUD patients across ASAM 3.7 / 3.5 facilities while maintaining patient safety, coverage continuity, documentation quality, provider accountability, and operational speed.

What Makes This Role Different?

Medical operations first: The CMO must build systems that actually work: staffing models, protocols, QA routines, reporting, scorecards, productivity standards, escalation rules, and accountability cadences.

High-acuity Medicaid access: The role is built around patients who are clinically, socially, and operationally complex. The right CMO sees safe access as a system-design challenge, not a reason to reflexively screen patients out.

ASAM documentation matters: The CMO must understand how ASAM criteria, level-of-care documentation, medical necessity, H&Ps, progress notes, continued-stay documentation, and provider notes affect coverage continuity and denials.

Provider accountability is central: The CMO must help recruit, evaluate, train, retain, and hold APPs/providers accountable. Recruiting support may come from HR, but clinical talent judgment and provider standards belong to medical leadership.

Fast decisioning is required: Alsos cannot build a model where every admission requires prolonged pre-admission review of extensive records. When clinically appropriate, the in-person assessment should be the primary gate.

Executive partnership is expected: The CMO reports to the CEO and is expected to operate as an ELT member: clear communication, practical judgment, accountability, and comfort making decisions under pressure.

Primary Responsibilities

1. Medical Operations and Provider Model Leadership

• Design, implement, and continuously improve the medical provider model for ASAM 3.7 / 3.5 facilities.
• Define whether and how centralized/virtual H&Ps and intake assessments should be used, while ensuring local providers own rounding, detox monitoring, treatment-team participation, urgent clinical issues, and facility integration.
• Establish provider productivity standards, tools, reporting, and accountability mechanisms that make those standards real.
• Define staffing standards by facility, including coverage needs, provider ratios, backup coverage, and PRN pool requirements.
• Partner with HR/recruiting to source providers while personally maintaining a high clinical bar for candidate evaluation.
• Evaluate APPs/providers with a critical eye, retain strong providers, coach where appropriate, and move quickly from underperformers when needed.
• Develop or approve onboarding, training, supervision, and medical protocol expectations for APPs/providers.

2. Admissions-Aligned Medical Judgment and High-Acuity Access

• Support a fast, clinically responsible admissions model for high-acuity SUD patients.
• Build staffing patterns, policies, procedures, QA protocols, escalation rules, and tight reporting that allow Alsos to safely support higher-acuity access.
• Treat pre-admission phone screens and record review as useful tools, but not as the default primary gate when in-person assessment is clinically and legally appropriate.
• Avoid paralysis by analysis, prolonged speculative risk review, or excessive medical-record requirements that unnecessarily slow access.
• Design temporary tighter admission criteria when a facility is not operating at a safe standard, while also defining what must change to safely expand criteria again.
• Partner with admissions and operations so patient safety and access are pursued together rather than treated as opposing goals.

3. ASAM, Medical Documentation, UR, and Coverage Continuity

• Set and approve medical documentation standards for H&Ps, withdrawal management, progress notes, continued-stay support, medical necessity, and level-of-care documentation.
• Ensure providers understand and document to ASAM 3.7 / 3.5 criteria in a way that supports clinically appropriate care and coverage continuity.
• Partner with UR, revenue cycle, compliance, and operations to reduce avoidable denials tied to medical documentation gaps.
• Train providers on documentation expectations and review whether documentation is actually supporting care coverage with no missed days or preventable lapses.
• Use data, audits, and provider scorecards to identify documentation gaps and drive correction.

4. Patient Safety, Medical Standards, and Evidence-Based Care

• Establish medical standards, protocols, escalation pathways, and quality expectations for detox, residential, and high-acuity SUD care.
• Maintain a MAT-forward, harm-reduction-aware, trauma-informed, evidence-based treatment philosophy.
• Collaborate with operations, nursing, compliance, and facility leadership to identify patient-safety risk early and correct it practically.
• Tell the truth when something is unsafe while bringing an actionable plan to make the system safer.
• Support credible medical responses to state, payer, or regulator concerns when physician leadership matters.

5. Executive Leadership and Cross-Functional Partnership

• Serve as a direct partner to the CEO and a member of the Executive Leadership Team.
• Communicate clearly with operators, compliance, admissions, UR, revenue cycle, nursing, facility CEOs, and provider teams.
• Balance patient safety, admissions flow, clinical standards, documentation quality, census implications, and provider accountability.
• Identify implementation risk before systems fail, then create reporting and scorecards that reveal whether the system is working.
• Support facility launches, medical stabilization, provider-model transitions, and organizational growth with practical medical leadership.

6. AI-Enabled Documentation and Operating Systems

• Be open to AI-supported documentation, reporting, QA, training, and provider-productivity workflows.
• Help evaluate or approve AI-first clinical documentation workflows where provider review, editing, and signoff remain clear.
• Use technology and process design to reduce wasted provider time, improve documentation quality, and create better visibility into performance.
• The CMO does not need to be an AI power user on day one, but must be adaptive, curious, and willing to learn.

Early Priorities

The first phase of the role will require immediate medical-operations execution. Candidates should expect to help finalize and operate the provider model quickly, not spend months observing from a distance.

• Stabilize provider coverage across active facilities.
• Finalize and operationalize the medical care model, including centralized H&P/intake assessment strategy and site-level rounding expectations.
• Define productivity standards by provider role and facility need.
• Clarify tools, reporting, scorecards, and accountability routines required to hit productivity and documentation standards.
• Determine provider staffing model by building, including PRN pool requirements and backup coverage expectations.
• Make ASAM/level-of-care documentation standards live and measurable.
• Support fast admissions decisioning without unsafe access expansion or unnecessary admissions slowdown.