Edisa Shirley, PhD, LMHC — Founder and Managing Partner
Edisa worked inside behavioral health before she advised on it. She practiced as a licensed clinician, ran multi-site operations across outpatient psychiatry, therapy, substance use, and ABA, and led integration on live transactions. Aluria's work comes out of that sequence rather than out of a coverage model.
At Refresh Mental Health, later Optum Behavioral Care, she led post-acquisition integration across a national outpatient platform: the operating model new practices were brought onto, clinical onboarding, provider retention through ownership change, and the integration playbook the platform went on to use for every subsequent acquisition. She ran that function through a cross-functional team spanning IT, HR, finance, revenue cycle, and clinical operations. She was the integration lead through a private equity recapitalization (Kelso & Company) and a strategic exit to UnitedHealth Group.
At Beacon Behavioral Partners she held portfolio operations and P&L responsibility across a multi-state, multi-clinic group, including interventional psychiatry service lines in TMS and esketamine and hospital-affiliated programs, with payer mix, revenue cycle, clinic-level margin, and clinical staffing in her remit. She standardized SOPs, workflows, and compliance protocols portfolio-wide. Provider retention reads to her as a clinical problem before it reads as a line item, because she has held both sides of it.
She also holds an executive role at a healthcare technology platform. That role gives her line of sight into the billing, workflow, and operating data of hundreds of behavioral health practices, which no banker or financial diligence provider has. It is also a conflict to manage in the open: engagements involving competing or adjacent vendors are disclosed in advance and declined where a conflict exists.
She sits on boards and advisory boards as well as in engagements: board director for a behavioral health non-profit, strategic advisor to private equity, family office, and healthcare venture investors, and past board member at healthcare technology companies. That governance seat is the third view of the same asset — what the sponsor is underwriting, what the operator is living, and what the board is being told.
