UHS Looks to ‘Step-In’ Behavioral Push as Key Volume Growth Driver

To cater to those patients, the UHS team plans to open about a dozen freestanding facilities annually “for the next several years,” Filton said. Those step-in sites are being set up under the umbrella of both UHS’ local health systems as well as with the Thousand Branches Wellness brand. Last year, the company opened Thousand Branches sites in office settings in California, Illinois, Minnesota and Texas and it has added another handful this year. Thousand Branches also markets virtual treatment options in Hawaii, Missouri and South Carolina. (See the map on the right.)

The sites aren’t a massive investment—it costs UHS between $1 million and $2 million to build out and staff a step-in clinic—and Filton said that his teams benefit from newly dedicated clinical and sales teams as well as the company typically being an in-network provider with strong referral relationships in most of its markets. That’s helping to position UHS as a more streamlined option to outpatient behavioral care being delivered in hospital emergency rooms, urgent-care centers or other clinics.

“A number of the managed care companies say […] behavioral utilization broadly and nationally is up across the board. A lot of that seems to be on the outpatient side. And I think that’s being delivered in a very […] fragmented way,” Filton said on UHS’ third-quarter earnings conference call. “We think we can do a better job of capturing more of that outpatient activity through, frankly, better focus as well as new and additional dedicated outpatient facilities.”

Growing UHS’ outpatient business is a key plank to executives’ broader goal of pushing the growth of overall behavioral volumes from the 1.3 percent it was in the third quarter to close to 2 percent by the middle of next year. In all, UHS registered more than 4.8 million patient days in the three months that ended on Sept. 30.