Oconomowoc-based Rogers Behavioral Health System Inc. has expanded quickly in recent years. Since 2014, the health system has added outpatient centers in Tampa, Nashville, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Meanwhile, it plans to add a residential unit for adults at its West Allis campus and 60 additional residential beds at its Oconomowoc hospital. Currently serving about 1,000 patients daily, Rogers is poised to serve as many as 1,400 a day.
In a recent interview with BizTimes Milwaukee reporter Lauren Anderson, Patrick Hammer, president and chief executive officer of Rogers, discussed the health care system’s growth.
Credit: Lila Aryan Photography
Why open regional centers?
“We wanted to continue to serve patients in their home communities that were traveling to Wisconsin for specialized residential care. Having patients travel to Oconomowoc for the intensive level of care, we wanted to have a transition experience for them back in their home communities, as well as serve patients that could receive care in one of our outpatient clinics so that they might not need to travel all the way to Wisconsin for care.”
Expected future growth?
“Right now we have a pretty high demand – we run waiting lists for some of our specialized residential treatment services. By building out these intermediate levels of care, we’re trying to decrease the number of patients on those waiting lists. We’ve been successful to a certain degree, but we’re also finding that, with the specialty nature of what we do, more people are hearing about us from these regional communities that we’re in and want to access these higher levels of care. We see growth in our residential treatment center division. We’ll be adding 100 beds over the next 12 to 18 months. In addition, we’ll be adding about 300 spots for outpatient care across the country. We’re forecasting that growth to continue over the next five years. Some will be organic growth at existing outpatient clinics and we are evaluating additional clinic sites across the country that we may add.”
Effect of the opioid crisis?
“Certainly with the issue of substance use disorders in our society, we need many quality providers to help treat addiction issues. We’re a little different in that we not only provide general detoxification services, but we provide the specialized services for persons that have co-occurring disorders. They may have a substance use disorder, but also an anxiety disorder or co-occurring post-traumatic stress disorder. We’re addressing a highly complex patient population and we’ll work with local community providers that provide more generalized care.”
