Northwell opening first addiction treatment facility centered on research

The escalating opioid crisis has prompted many health systems to integrate addiction medicine services within primary-care delivery settings, with varying degrees of success.

About eight years ago, New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health began planning a different route. It would create a residential and outpatient treatment facility centered on addiction medicine research. When Wellbridge Addiction Treatment and Research opens in November in Long Island, it’ll be the first of its kind in the nation.

“The possibility of having patients literally down the hall from scientists was something that I wanted,” said Andrew Drazan, CEO and co-founder of Wellbridge.

The $95 million, six-building, 40-acre campus will include 80 residential beds and a 6,000 square-foot research facility.

Twenty beds will be used for patients undergoing medically supervised detox while 40 beds will be available for monthlong rehabilitation stays. Another 20 beds will be for stays of up to three months. Nearly half of Wellbridge’s staff will be clinical professionals.

“I didn’t want to create another rehab dealing with addiction,” Drazan said. “I thought that if we could integrate more science, more medicine and treat addiction like other chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes, then why not?”

Treatment for addiction has remained largely unchanged for decades, with mainstream therapies such as medically assisted treatments getting broad acceptance and support only within the past two decades.

Jon Morgenstern, assistant vice president of addiction services at Northwell, is leading the research at Wellbridge. He said too often research excludes input from providers actively caring for patients.

Typically community addiction treatment programs serve as test sites for researchers from other institutions who test their ideas on patients. That allows for an exchange of knowledge, but rarely impacts the treatment program because the researchers don’t interact with clinicians or patients.

“We don’t have an evidence treatment program model, and that’s a huge problem in our field,” Morgenstern said.

There is plenty of research being conducted to understand more effective treatments for addiction, which was responsible for more than 68,000 deaths in 2018 and more than 72,000 in 2017.

Performing studies within clinical settings will allow researchers to address real-world factors involving patients and their environment that may not be present while testing in the laboratory, Morgenstern said.

“We have a lot of treatments that have proven efficacious in clinical trials, but clinical trial work by their very nature is pretty controlled,” he added. “When you think about how care is delivered in the addiction space, we don’t really know how all of the various components with that setting interact with each other to produce outcomes.”

Wellbridge Medical Director Dr. Harshal Kirane said research will be subsidized through grants and donations and that care provided to patients involved in research will be free.

“There’s a tremendous amount of research on addiction, and like other areas of medicine, it’s often difficult to translate the science into good clinical care,” Morgenstern said. “There’s always a gap in every medical field, but the gap in addiction is larger than it is in other disorders. We need a more robust effort to bring science into clinical care.”

That could explain why so few medically trained professionals provide addiction treatment. The long-held stigma around addiction led the medical community at large to leave treatment mostly to those who advocated 12-step programs primarily based on abstinence. Such programs have opposed using medically assisted treatments like methadone and buprenorphine despite those therapies having a higher success rate than 12-step programs alone.

Morgenstern envisions Wellbridge as a center that will be known for addiction medicine the way the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have become synonymous with cutting-edge cancer care.

“Wellbridge, I think, will be unique within the landscape of addiction treatment,” Morgenstern said.