Mental health facilities to grow

Southern Nevada's contingent of behavioral-health hospital beds is poised for a big boost.

Pioneer Behavioral Health, a Massachusetts company that operates three outpatient behavioral-health clinics in the Las Vegas Valley, is building two local inpatient treatment centers for psychiatric patients. The hospitals will bring about 160 new beds to the market -- a 37.5 percent increase over the city's current 400 psychiatric-inpatient beds.

Pioneer will open its 58-bed Seven Hills Behavioral Health Institute on Wednesday inside the Seven Hills Business Park at 3021 Horizon Ridge Parkway. And the company will begin construction in the next three months on a 100-bed hospital adjoining Southern Hills Hospital & Medical Center in southwest Las Vegas. The hospital is scheduled to open in about 18 months.

Two new outpatient clinics will accompany the hospitals.

Bruce Shear, president and chief executive officer of Pioneer Behavioral Health, said the city's good business climate and its severe shortage of behavioral-health services inspired the hospitals. Pioneer also has a substantial client base in Las Vegas, carrying contracts with most of the city's biggest resort operators, as well as agreements with Culinary Local 226 and several major insurers.

Behavioral-health professionals say Pioneer's plans are welcome.

"Mental-health services have been very overtaxed due to the area's rapid growth," said Harold Cook, administrator of the state's Division of Mental Health and Developmental Services. "Clark County has just been growing like a mushroom for years now, and it's been very difficult for the state to fund the necessary resources to keep up with demand. Any private entity that comes in to add mental-health services is more than welcome."

Cook said the loss of private psychiatric hospital beds in the Las Vegas Valley, coupled with growth, helped spur an "emergency-room crisis" several years ago, as mentally ill patients with few treatment options flooded acute-care hospitals.

Experts told the Review-Journal last November that as many as 13,000 mental patients a year end up in valley emergency rooms because they have nowhere else to go.

Cook isn't sure why prior private behavioral-health hospitals here chose to close, but he said insurance coverage could have played a role in their decisions to leave the market. Most insurers don't pay for mental-health treatments as comprehensively as they shell out for physical ailments. Insurance reimbursements for behavioral-health providers are often lower, too.

"If you can be paid $1,300 to $1,400 a day for an acute-care bed as opposed to $800 or $900 a day for a psychiatric bed, you make a business decision," Cook said.

Pioneer executives said they expect the Seven Hills hospital to bring in around $12 million a year. They're projecting $25 million in annual revenue at the Sunset hospital. It's costing about $10 million to develop both centers. Pioneer owns 25 percent of the real estate its hospital near Southern Hills will occupy, and the company is leasing space from the partnership through which it's building out the project.

Dr. Lesley Dickson, president of the Nevada Psychiatric Association, said she appreciates Pioneer's efforts to address the shortage of mental-health services in Southern Nevada, but she said she's concerned the new hospitals won't help the area's neediest patients.

Many psychiatric patients also have physical illnesses, and they'll still need acute-hospital treatment, she said.

Plus, Dickson said, people with serious, persistent mental illness often have either no insurance, or they're covered through Medicaid and other government programs that don't typically pay for treatment in freestanding psychiatric hospitals.

That means little relief for local emergency rooms, because patients who lack coverage for private treatment generally head to acute-care hospitals to wait for a bed inside one of the local clinics belonging to the state's Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services agency.

Dickson is also uncertain about staffing at Pioneer's hospitals. More psychiatrists have left Nevada than have arrived here in recent years, she said.

Shear said his company is addressing the issues Dickson cited.

To encourage insurance coverage of treatments at the hospitals, Pioneer is pursuing certification through the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

The company also has a full-time recruiter hiring doctors from across the nation. The Seven Hills hospital has already brought in one psychiatrist from out of state; she starts Monday. And Pioneer will work with the University of Nevada School of Medicine, bringing in residents to provide care.

"We're committed to a major presence in the Las Vegas market," Shear said. "Current hospitals are running at very high occupancies and are turning patients away. And the population is going to double on top of that. Add those two factors together, and with our new hospitals and the existing players, we can fill a need in the market for the next 20 years."

Contact reporter Jennifer Robison at jrobison@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512.