Why a local real estate developer is getting into the substance abuse treatment business

Montgomery County-based developer J. Brian O’Neill said he isn’t getting out of the real estate business, but he does want to spend more time during the back end of his career having a direct impact on people’s health and well being.

That’s why he started a new venture, called Recovery Centers of America. The King of Prussia company Wednesday morning announced its had raised $231.5 million in funding from Deerfield Management Co., the New York-based health care investment firm. Recovery Centers plans to use that money to establish a network of 50 substance abuse and mental health treatment centers across the country.

Its first group of centers are expected to include facilities in Blackwood and Mount Laurel, both in New Jersey, and in Paoli, Pa.

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“For 35 years I’ve been doing interventions and helping people get treatment for alcohol and drug abuse,” O’Neill said. “I’ve been doing it quietly. When you do an intervention, it can take two hours or it can take two days. The problem is when somebody agrees to get treatment you can’t always find a [hospital] bed, or if you do it’s in California or Florida or in some rural part of Pennsylvania or it's in a rundown facility. People can spend $25,000 or $30,000 a month and the treatment doesn’t work.”

O’Neil said a few years back, when the economy was tanking and his real estate business was struggling, he got the idea to develop a national network of recovery treatment centers.

“The centers would be like community hospitals where people could go one place nearby to get care,” he said.

O’Neill, who heads O’Neill Properties Group in King of Prussia, said he wrote a 400-page business business plan for Recovery Centers and began hiring doctors and administrators to staff and run the centers.

Recovery Centers has already hired 50 people — including industry veteran Deni Carise as its chief clinical officer — and plans to hire 1,400 people over the next two years. The company has also bought 15 properties for its centers, and closed on eight of them.

O’Neil said the plan is to open eight centers over the next two years, then seven more “over the next couple years following that.” The company's long-term target is to open and operate 50 centers in key markets across the country.

On its web page, Recovery Centers said its goal is to help one million Americans "achieve and sustain meaningful, lasting recovery, and to become a leading force for patient advocacy, public education and the advancement of addiction medicine."

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal