The facility will fill a gap in mental health services in Montgomery County that was created by the state closure of Dayton’s Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare in June 2008. The center at 136 Heid Ave. will also serve patients with mental illness and substance abuse dependency. Clients will be referred to Morningstar by community mental health centers.
Twenty-two health care professionals will work at the facility, said Kathy Peroutka, program director.
Montgomery County currently spends $535 a day per patient for residential treatment at Summit Behavioral Healthcare in Cincinnati, with a maximum of 22 beds. The individual per-day cost for Morningstar will in the $280 to $300 range.
One-year operating costs for Morningstar are estimated at $1.5 million. The Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association and the Montgomery County Human Services Levy Council will pay up to $620,000 each toward the one-year operating costs. The balance, about $300,000, is expected to come from patient payments made by Medicaid, Medicare or private health insurance.
“Everybody hopes to reduce reliance on use of state hospitals, use of our emergency rooms and psychiatric beds. It’s something that could work,” said Bryan Bucklew, president and CEO of the hospital association. “We said we would support it for a year, then re-access.”
Now people will be able to “step down” to a less intensive program, be closer to home and it will come at a cost savings to the county, said Joseph Szoke, director of the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services of Montgomery County.
“It gives us another option we didn’t have before,” Szoke said. “We have an obligation to provide the best possible care in the least restrictive way.”
The one-story Morningstar building was purchased by Nova House nearly a decade ago and has been vacant for two years.
Nova House is a private, nonprofit corporation that provides recovery and counseling services to about 100 clients monthly who are chemically dependent or abusing drugs.
Nova House, which specializes in inpatient and outpatient drug and alcohol and drug addiction services, lost state funding in 2010 for a program intended to divert offenders from prison by addressing their underlying psychological or addictive problems.
A study, commissioned by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, was critical of program outcomes.
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