By Dwight Mussleman, Chief Development Officer
Last year we saw tremendous growth in locations and accessibility, and now, we’re kicking off 2022 with the largest expansion yet in our company’s history with the acquisition of Center for Behavioral Health (CBH), taking us to 117 treatment facilities and two labs in 24 states. With this comes the addition of more than 200 teammates and 7,000 patients with whom we are fortunate to serve.
CBH is a traditional provider of outpatient addiction and behavioral health services with 20 centers in eight states. BHG did not have a presence in five of those states — Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada —which provides a strategic market entry opportunity.
Opioid overdose deaths now represent the number one cause of accidental death in the United States, surpassing automobile accidents in 2018. In 2021, overdose death increased 30% in the U.S. and topped 100,000 for the first time. Moreover, there is a large and growing number of Americans abusing substances in addition to opioids, including alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, and stimulants. BHG is one of the few scalable platform companies purposely built to address this problem. Furthermore, outpatient MAR treatment facilities — delivered in either OTP or OBOT practices — provide the gold standard of care at a fraction of the cost of residential treatment programs, a fact that further drives the growth strategy for BHG.
What this merger means today and tomorrow
“We’re simply delivering on the most effective, lowest cost, full-service addiction recovery solution available today,” said Jay Higham, BHG CEO. “Joining our companies positions us as one of the leading providers of MAT services and OUD treatment in the U.S., and tomorrow, we plan on being the leading provider of outpatient addiction and co-occurring mental health services. We will do that by expanding our services, investing in our people and our infrastructure, and fully integrating into the communities we serve. That is the vision that gets me up in the morning.”
All 20 treatment centers and their respective staffs are integral to our growth plans. The CBH Boise office and employees are joining the BHG team as an extension of our Home Office. As BHG grows, we expect to add teammates to the Boise location, along with treatment center staffing to support patient census growth and product expansion. All CBH leaders are now part of the BHG leadership team, some in expanded roles across all BHG.
Over the last five years, BHG has grown through acquisitions and de novo sites from a minimal service, cash-pay business model to a professionalized health care business, resulting in a 25% compounded annual growth. Over the next five years, we expect to continue the transition by sophisticating our clinical model and continuing to scale into new markets.
“Our plan is to invest in acquisitions like CBH to rapidly scale points of access and to expand our service lines across our national footprint to address broader addiction disorders for which MAR has proven beneficial,” said Ben Nordstrom, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer of BHG. “Leveraging a more sophisticated and integrated care model that employs the full spectrum of evidence-based medication, behavioral therapy and mental health services brings opportunities to serve more of a population in crisis. Our medical mission is to empower our patients to realize their best level of functioning in the community.”
Our clinical care model enables recovery care teams to meet each patient where they are as a unique individual, providing dynamic, flexible treatment and ongoing care as their goals, motivations and needs change on their personal path toward recovery.
“We knew there was a strong clinical-alignment philosophically,” said Brant Massman, co-owner of CBH. “Now, CBH can expand its service line offering by adopting BHG’s clinical model expansion plan which is a build out of capabilities to provide care across the full spectrum of OUD, other outpatient substance use disorder treatment modalities, and mental health, ” said Brant Massman, co-owner of CBH.
To our new teammates from CBH, welcome to our family!
We are so proud to have you and your expertise joining BHG. We understand change can be overwhelming and you’re probably hearing a lot of new names and accessing new systems and resources. Over the longer term, we expect to introduce new services, shift your centers to Joint Commission accreditation, upgrade your IT systems, implement a unified electronic medical record system, and supply more training and career paths for you.
Our combined leaders in the clinical and operations teams are developing plans that make sense, given our expanded footprint, and all of this will be shared with you in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, please reach out to your new colleagues with questions. As we learn about one another, I’m sure we’ll have questions for you, too.
This is an exciting new day at BHG as we strengthen our course in restoring lives, strengthening families and rejuvenating communities, together.
