Fast Growing New Opiate Players Emerging

Addiction Treatment Industry Newswire

05/10/2013 – ATIN – A model of what opiate addiction treatment drug rehab care may look in the future, fast growing and well financed Behavioral Health Group earlier this month added another clinic to its fast growing stable – Columbia, TN – after acquiring another three opiate treatment clinics in eastern Kentucky early this year, bringing to 29 the total number of opiate treatment centers across 8 states in the Midwest, South and Southeast.

New Opiate Players

BHG announced early this month that its opiate clinics would offer both methadone and Suboxone at its centers, which rely on an ambulatory detox model being increasingly favored by commercial payors. Along with players Like Medmark, Dallas-based BHG is offering significant competition to the largest entrenched methadone clinic operators like Cupertino, CA-based CRC Health and Orlando-based Colonial, who have in the past relied on acquisitions to achie

ve their leading positions in the opiate treatment and maintenance industry, which on the methadone clinic side has approximately $1.2B in annual revenues and 1,100 clinics nationwide. Eating into the methadone clinic business substantially has been the phenomenal growth of the doctors’ office-based Suboxone practices, which together last year wrote $1.5B worth of prescriptions for the blockbuster drug.CRC Methadone Reliance

CRC is still very reliant on methadone for sales and profits, despite the fact that CRC did not acquire any new clinics last year and its total number of clinics, at 57 still the most of any other opiate provider in the nation, remaining quite static for the last few years. While sales at CRC’s methadone clinics grew over 2 percent to almost $135M, revenues at the company’s 29 treatment centers fell last year by about 1 percent to $219M, the first time perhaps in the company history that treatment sales have declined on annual basis, a fall driven by the virtual absence of acquisitions in recent years – last year there were zero treatment center buys – and new management’s failure to spur organic same-facility growth in 2012 – a boom year generally on the private side of the addiction treatment business.

2013 Opiate Buy

Earlier this year, CRC announced it had acquired an “outpatient” provider – methadone/Suboxone clinic – Willamette Valley Treatment Center in Oregon, bringing to the three or four the total number acquisitions in the opiate business that CRC has done in the last few years.

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