Salience Marks 15 Years of Advancing TMS and Rethinking the Delivery of Behavioral Healthcare
Dallas – Fort Worth behavioral health practice celebrates 15 years of growth, more than one million TMS treatments delivered, and an ongoing commitment to building a more connected, outcomes-driven model of mental healthcare.
Salience Health is celebrating its 15th anniversary, marking a milestone that reflects both the practice’s growth and its continued effort to change what patients can expect from behavioral healthcare. What began in 2011 with a focus on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) has evolved into an integrated behavioral health practice built around a central belief: treatment should be measured not simply by whether a patient improves, but by how close that patient can get to remission, recovery, and returning to the life their illness has disrupted.
Over the past 15 years, Salience has delivered more than one million TMS treatments while continuing to expand its approach to psychiatric care. The practice now brings together psychiatry, therapy, TMS and ongoing patient support within a collaborative care model designed to address a persistent challenge in behavioral healthcare: patients are often treated within a fragmented system that makes it difficult to see, measure and respond to the full picture of their recovery.
Behavioral healthcare can be difficult to navigate and may require a patient to move between multiple providers and treatments, often operating independently of one another. A psychiatrist may manage medication, a therapist may address another aspect of care, advanced treatments may be delivered elsewhere, and the patient’s primary care physician may have limited visibility into that care. Salience has spent much of its 15-year history working to close those gaps by coordinating care within its own model while maintaining ongoing communication with primary care physicians and other providers involved in the patient’s care.
That belief led Salience to evolve beyond its origins as a TMS-focused practice and develop a broader model of care centered on collaboration, measurement and earlier recognition – when a patient is not progressing as expected. By bringing different components of behavioral healthcare together and routinely evaluating outcomes, the practice seeks to reduce the amount of time patients spend cycling through treatments that are not producing sufficient results.
As early adopters of TMS therapy, Salience has led the community offering premier depression care. Advanced treatments like TMS were still relatively unfamiliar to many patients and healthcare providers. Salience has 48 providers across seven locations and has delivered more than one million TMS treatment sessions since its founding.
Salience believes that the next chapter of TMS will require more than expanding access to technology. It will require continued attention to outcomes, emerging research, treatment protocols, patient selection and the integration of TMS with the other components of behavioral healthcare.
“Reaching one million TMS treatments represents 15 years of patients trusting us with some of the most difficult chapters of their lives,” said Katherine Kriske, Chief Growth Officer of Salience Health. “That experience has shaped who we are as a practice and how we think about the future of TMS. We have seen what can happen when patients who have spent years cycling through medications and living with persistent symptoms are finally given another path forward. Our responsibility now is to build on everything we have learned—to continue advancing how TMS is delivered, expand access to patients who can benefit from it, and keep pushing the standard of behavioral healthcare beyond managing illness toward helping people truly recover. One million treatments is an incredible milestone, but what I am most proud of is what those treatments have made possible in the lives of the people and families we serve.”
While improvement is meaningful, Salience believes the field must continue moving toward a higher standard in which remission, function and quality of life are central measures of success.
For patients, the distinction can be profound. A reduction in symptoms does not necessarily mean someone has returned to work, rebuilt relationships, regained the ability to concentrate, begun sleeping normally or rediscovered the ability to experience joy. Salience’s approach is rooted in the belief that these aspects of a patient’s life should matter when evaluating whether treatment is working.
“We want people to connect to a better quality of life. That concept has been the driving force behind the development of the care model we have today,” said Dr. Nancy Donachie, Chief Medical Officer of Salience Health. “Our providers want their patients to feel cared for, to feel safe, and to trust that their best interests are always paramount to the people involved in their care.”
As Salience enters its next 15 years, the practice plans to continue investing in the advancement of TMS while strengthening the integrated model of behavioral healthcare that has developed around it. That work includes using clinical outcomes and emerging science to inform treatment, improving coordination across disciplines, identifying patients who are not progressing sooner, and continuing to challenge assumptions about what successful psychiatric treatment should look like.
The anniversary comes at a time when demand for mental healthcare remains high and many of the structural problems within the behavioral health system remain unresolved. Access alone does not solve fragmentation, and increasing the number of appointments available does not necessarily improve outcomes. Salience believes the next evolution of behavioral healthcare must focus not only on getting patients into treatment, but on creating systems capable of helping them move through treatment toward measurable recovery.
Fifteen years after its founding, that challenge remains at the center of the practice’s mission.
Relentlessly pursuing remission and recovery together, one patient at a time.