Sunwave Names Corey Hansen CEO, Launches Crest Board

Sunwave named Corey Hansen CEO on July 21, 2026, and launched Crest, a customer advisory board comprising executive, clinical, and operational leaders from nine behavioral health organizations. The pairing matters because the leadership appointment and the advisory board point to the same operating priority: shaping Sunwave's next phase of product development around the people running treatment centers.

Sunwave connects admissions, electronic medical records, customer relationship management, revenue cycle management, clinical documentation, billing, and alumni engagement within a single behavioral health software platform. Those capabilities may appear as individual software modules, but providers experience them as one connected operating system supporting patients, clinicians, payers, and financial performance.

Crest held its inaugural summit in Nashville, where members worked with Sunwave leadership on clinical workflows, the patient journey, revenue cycle management, and AI priorities. According to the company's announcement, those discussions are intended to inform both Sunwave's product roadmap and Hansen's near-term strategy.

A Leadership Change After a Year of Integration

Hansen assumes leadership following a concentrated period of corporate and product integration. Sunwave Health and Lightning Step merged in October 2025 with a strategic growth investment from BVP Forge and continued backing from Level Equity, Blueprint Equity, and Gallant Capital Partners. At the time, the companies reported a combined network of more than 3,000 facilities across all 50 states and more than 34,000 users.

In June 2026, the combined company unified its legacy brands under the Sunwave name. Simplifying the brand was only one step. The larger challenge is ensuring that products, workflows, customer support, and organizational processes function as a single platform.

Sunwave says Hansen brings two decades of technology leadership and most recently served as CEO of private-equity-backed healthcare software company Lumistry, where he led four acquisitions and grew annual recurring revenue beyond $40M. Lumistry's official materials independently confirm Hansen's leadership role and his work building a platform that unified multiple pharmacy workflows. The acquisition count and ARR figure come from Sunwave's executive biography and should be viewed as company-reported background rather than independently audited performance metrics.

What Crest Actually Changes

Crest provides Sunwave with a formal mechanism for customer input at a point when the company is defining what an integrated behavioral health platform should become. The advisory board's initial agenda covered clinical workflows, patient movement, billing operations, and AI, areas that are deeply interconnected within behavioral health. A change to documentation can alter clinician workload, influence claim quality, affect reimbursement timing, and ultimately change how much attention remains for patient care.

The announcement identifies Cumberland Heights as one Crest participant but does not disclose the remaining eight organizations. Nick Hayes, PhD, Chief Science Officer at Cumberland Heights, described the frustration providers often experience when technology decisions are made by people without firsthand treatment-center experience. According to Hayes, Sunwave's approach began by asking how the work is actually performed rather than presenting predetermined solutions.

That represents a credible starting point rather than a proven outcome. Customer advisory boards can improve product discovery, uncover workflow dependencies, and give leadership a clearer understanding of where software creates operational friction. They can also become carefully managed listening sessions that produce little measurable change, particularly when participating organizations operate with different clinical models, payer mixes, program structures, and business priorities.

Behavioral Health Software Has No Harmless Workflow

Behavioral health providers manage tightly connected clinical and administrative operations. Admissions teams need accurate referral and patient information. Clinicians require secure documentation tools. Billing teams depend on claims aligned with payer requirements, while executives need a reliable operational view of performance. When those systems fall out of sync, employees reconcile the gaps manually and patients often experience the consequences.

Sunwave's position is that a unified EMR, CRM, RCM, and AI-supported platform reduces those disconnects through a shared data environment. The company also describes SIA as an AI capability supporting behavioral health documentation and clinical decision-support workflows. These remain company descriptions, and Crest's practical value will depend on whether customer feedback meaningfully shapes how those capabilities are designed, governed, measured, and deployed.

Artificial intelligence makes the advisory structure even more significant. Behavioral health documentation carries clinical, privacy, reimbursement, and regulatory implications, making accuracy as important as efficiency. Providers will ultimately want evidence showing how Sunwave validates AI-assisted workflows, manages disagreements between automation and clinical judgment, and translates advisory feedback into governance that clinicians can trust.

What Corey Hansen Inherits

Hansen inherits a company with meaningful scale, institutional backing, overlapping product histories, and a customer base that cannot treat integration as a theoretical exercise. The combined Sunwave platform must continue supporting clinicians and operators while the organization completes the integration of legacy systems and internal teams. That creates as much of an operational challenge as a product challenge.

His experience at Lumistry is relevant because that organization also brought multiple healthcare technology products together within a broader platform strategy. That does not suggest Sunwave has announced another acquisition program, and the company has made no such claim. It does indicate Hansen has previously navigated platform consolidation, overlapping products, and customer migration.

The leadership transition itself remains only lightly explained. Sunwave's June brand announcement identified Brent Michael as CEO, while the July announcement names Hansen without describing Michael's current role or explaining the leadership change. The more useful story, therefore, is not speculation about the transition but the priorities Sunwave has publicly established: customer partnership, platform integration, and a product roadmap shaped by provider workflows.

What to Watch Next

The first test will be transparency. Sunwave has not disclosed Crest's complete membership, governance charter, meeting cadence, decision-making authority, or measures of success. Greater visibility into those elements would help customers understand whether Crest functions as a long-term governance body, a structured product advisory group, or something in between.

The second test will be visible product execution. Operators should watch for releases tied to clinical documentation, patient journey coordination, revenue cycle management, and AI governance, the four priorities highlighted during the Nashville summit. Sunwave's case becomes stronger when it can connect specific Crest recommendations to shipped product changes and demonstrate measurable improvements for providers.

The third test will be how Sunwave manages competing priorities. A multi-site enterprise provider, a nonprofit addiction treatment organization, and a specialized mental health program can each require different capabilities from the same platform. Crest will become meaningful if Sunwave can translate those competing perspectives into clear product priorities without sacrificing the specialized workflows that brought each organization to the table.

Hansen's appointment gives Sunwave a new executive responsible for that work, while Crest gives customers a formal place within the conversation. The long-term significance will be measured less by the inaugural summit than by the product and operational decisions that emerge from it.