“We pick up the tab.”įull retail for Gilead’s hepatitis C medication is about $60,000. “They no longer have to pick up that tab,” he said. Odyssey House would have always paid for someone’s medications for HIV or HCV, but now that an FQHC is involved, they don’t have to do that, explained Grisafi. “We treat more than 800 people a year with HIV or HCV.” The medications for these conditions work but are expensive. “We know that people going through recovery have a high percentage of HIV and HCV,” said Grisafi. Anyone below 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL) is slid down to a reduced fee, and anyone below 100% of the FPL gets the service for free.
Treatment is available on a sliding scale. The Wards Island facility is only for residents of Wards Island.Īt Wards Island, primary care, OB-GYN and oral health (dental) services are offered. Damian transports patients from site to site for services that aren’t available. There are referrals from site to site – for example, for optometry, neurology or pain management, which aren’t at every site. Damian treats more than 12,000 patients a year, more than 6,000 of whom are in a collocated model where the FQHC partners with an addiction treatment program. Often patients graduate from addiction treatment but come back for health care – either at the collocated site or at one of the other sites (there are 12 sites with collocated addiction treatment and health care). “We have a specialty in treating people who are going through recovery,” Grisafi told ADAW. But that’s where the help ended: The rest of it is smart people using New York’s generous Medicaid program, the release of liability based on tort reform and the vision of people who have worked in the system long enough to know that if you don’t treat a person’s addiction, they won’t get well in other ways either.ĭamian Family Care is a network of 15 centers located in New York City and Long Island, and expanding into upstate New York. There’s a gym, art studio, bedrooms that rival any college dorm room we have seen, views, child care (including for babies) and on-site health care.ĭamian had help: the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports contributed $28 million to the construction of the Wards Island building. We have visited about 50 treatment centers and agree (see photos of the art studio, below). The Wards Island program is, Tavolacci said, the “Taj Mahal” of publicly funded treatment centers. Similarly, their colleagues at Odyssey House, Peter Provet, Ph.D., Odyssey House CEO, and John Tavolacci, Odyssey House COO, have long careers in the treatment field and embrace the Damian/Odyssey partnership as the right model for providing health care and substance use disorder treatment in an integrated setting. Peter Grisafi, CEO of Damian, and Henry Bartlett, vice president for government and community relations, collectively have more than 75 years in the addiction treatment arena. It is run by people who are committed to addiction treatment and recovery. When we visited Damian Family Care Centers’ Wards Island facility in New York City, collocating addiction treatment services run by Odyssey House and a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) run by Damian, all we could think was: “Why isn’t this done everywhere?” Damian originated as a part of Samaritan Health Services but is now an independent not-for-profit corporation.
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