Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation is continuing to expand by way of outpatient clinics with plans for a new addiction treatment center early next year in the Seattle area.
The new facility will be the 15th clinical site for the Center City, Minn.,-based nonprofit, and is the latest in a series of new operations for Hazelden on the West Coast.
In 2014, Hazelden merged with the California-based Betty Ford Center, which has since added two locations in the state.
"We heard from a number of Seattle-area business and health care leaders, who said additional quality treatment services were needed to meet swelling demand brought on by the opioid overdose epidemic and broader addiction crisis," Mark Mishek, the chief executive of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, said in a news release.
In 2017, Hazelden eliminated 57 jobs as the addiction treatment provider adjusted to discounted payment rates from health insurers plus cash-flow trouble related to a new system for electronic health records. The nonprofit has been dealing with a shift away from patients who pay their own way for care, toward more who rely on lower-paying health insurance coverage for residential care.
As a result, Hazelden has shifted to a more individualized treatment model for patients that often features shorter inpatient stays followed by several weeks of outpatient treatment that's covered by insurers. In a May interview with the Star Tribune, Mishek said the nonprofit had largely made its way through the change, and was seeing better financial results and good outcomes for patients.
Located in Bellevue, Wash., the new center is scheduled to open in late January 2019 with eight employees. At the end of June, Hazelden had the equivalent of 1,197 full-time employees.
"We already receive a lot of patients from the Seattle area at our residential site in Newberg, [Oregon]," Mishek said in a statement. "Now that we'll be able to help them to transition to outpatient services in their home area, we think Newberg will become even more attractive to people in Seattle."
