Behavioral health care provider Newport Healthcare has expanded its substance use disorder (SUD) treatment offerings tailored to teens, young people and their families.
Newport has previously offered SUD services in conjunction with its mental health offerings but is now isolating the services into SUD-specific programs.
“The demand for substance abuse services is not going away,” Joe Procopio, CEO of Newport, told Addiction Treatment Business. “It’s just a redefinition of how we’re providing the service as opposed to how we used to provide them traditionally.”
The provider opened a six-bed rehabilitation group home in Temecula, California, with similar operations in Minnesota, Utah and Connecticut. Newport is also expanding its services in Washington state to treat SUD and co-occurring conditions.
The scalability of Newport’s SUD services will be market driven and expectations for the six-bed SUD location are “fairly modest,” Procopio said.
“We will take a snapshot of what the community needs are for folks who are being referred into those programs and if there’s a defined fine need for additional substance abuse services, we will grow those services out to support the community needs,” Procopio said. “Each year we go through a strategic analysis as to what the market looks like, and then we build our programs to support those community needs.”
Market demand differs geographically, Procopio said. Newport will work to add capacity to its markets where demand is outpacing the current capacity.
“Similar to what we did in Minnesota and Utah, we saw similar demand in Southern California,” Procopio said. “We decided we had a little excess capacity to convert one of our traditional young adult homes to one that was specifically dedicated to substance abuse disorders and we complemented that with a detox service.”
Newport’s SUD-specific services include residential treatment, partial hospitalization programs (PHPs), intensive outpatient programs (IOP), medication-assisted treatment (MAT) and detoxification services.
Newport Healthcare, founded in 2008, provides behavioral health treatment for teens ages 12 to 18, young adults ages 18 to 35 and families. The provider has facilities in Utah, California, Minnesota, Connecticut and Virginia.
Newport acquired Minnesota-based psychiatric health system PrairieCare in 2022, adding nine locations to its roster. The provider uses a fee-for-service reimbursement structure and accepts most major commercial insurance plans, including Carelon, Anthem and BlueCross BlueShield.
Newport admitted 4,395 patients to its residential and outpatient programs in 2023, according to its most recent outcomes report. It also began treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) the same year and now has waitlists for the three programs offering OCD care.
“We will add capacity to meet that demand,” Procopio said. “It’s really doing a good fundamental assessment, which we do every year, and then building capacity around that assessment, based on what the market desires. That’s our priority in the short term.”
Top of Newport’s long-term priorities is building out its continuum of care.
Behavioral health services for young people have attracted significant investments in recent years. Private equity firm The Vistria Group invested upwards of $200 million in Sandstone Care, a provider of such services for young people, including offerings for depression, trauma, anxiety and substance use.
Sandstone Care has continued to grow since the investment and recently opened a new outpatient facility in Buffalo Grove, Illinois.
Alternatively, adolescent behavioral health provider Embark has recently shuttered its wilderness therapy program and closed two of its locations.
