UnitedHealthcare / Optum

Same corporate family, different roles. UnitedHealthcare is the health plan; Optum is the UnitedHealth Group company that administers UnitedHealthcare's behavioral health — historically known as United Behavioral Health (UBH) and today operating as Optum Behavioral Health. So “United Behavioral Health” and “Optum Behavioral Health” name the same behavioral health manager across a rebrand, while “UnitedHealthcare” names the plan whose members that manager serves. The two are corporate affiliates: UnitedHealthcare engages its sibling company as its behavioral health manager. When a facility talks about “the UHC behavioral health contract,” the entity on the other side of that contract is Optum.

Optum, not UnitedHealthcare. This is the signature carve-out in behavioral health: a facility contracting for UnitedHealthcare members' behavioral health services contracts with Optum, and credentialing runs through Provider Express — Optum's behavioral health provider portal — rather than UnitedHealthcare's medical provider channels. Facilities lose months by aiming at the wrong door. Pursuing “a UnitedHealthcare contract” for behavioral health is, in practice, pursuing an Optum contract; knowing that is step one, and knowing the portal is step two.

Through Optum's behavioral health provider channels, starting at Provider Express — not through UnitedHealthcare's medical contracting. A facility is credentialed and contracted as an organization (by tax ID and facility NPI, by level of care), which is a different track from an individual clinician joining the network on a professional fee schedule; confirm which track you are on before the paperwork starts, because it determines the kind of rate you will negotiate. Then prepare for the counterparty: Optum is one of the two dominant national behavioral health networks — for most facilities among the highest-leverage contracts to hold, and the one where the leverage sits most heavily on the payer's side. It sees its own rates across the whole market; you should arrive knowing where yours stand.

There is no single “Optum rate.” A negotiated facility rate depends on the level of care (detox, residential, PHP, IOP, inpatient psychiatric — with eating-disorder programs billed on the same level-of-care structure), the contract's payment structure (per diem, case rate, or percent of charges), the UnitedHealthcare product behind the member, your market, and when the rate was last negotiated. Billing structure decides what the rate attaches to: facility claims are keyed to revenue codes and HCPCS — residential under revenue codes 1001/1002 or H0018, partial hospitalization under 0912/0913 or H0035, intensive outpatient under 0905/0906 or H0015, detox under 0126 or H0010 — and two rates on the same code are only comparable when the rest of the contract structure matches. Against a network of Optum's scale, that comparability is what turns “we should get more” into an ask that survives contact.

By comparing actual negotiated facility rates on the same code, level of care, and market — never a blended average, and never a modeled estimate. Optum is a national facility book in TierBench's coverage: a national behavioral health carve-out with facility-level capture across the core levels of care — detox, residential, PHP, IOP, and inpatient psychiatric care — extracted from public Transparency in Coverage files and resolved to the facility. (TierBench also carries a separate UnitedHealthcare facility book for North Carolina; it is a distinct regional slice, not Optum's national behavioral health network, and we keep the two apart.) A facility can see where its Optum rate sits as a percentile position among comparable facilities in its market, by level of care — and because Optum is one of the two largest behavioral health networks in the country, that position is one of the most consequential numbers in its payer mix. The fastest way to get it is a free rate analysis of your own contract.