Behavioral health provider launches in Marshfield

A Marshfield-based adolescent behavioral health provider opened the doors this fall to its first residential treatment center. The facility sits on 34 acres the company owns outside of the Webster County town.

Velocity Health Group LLC received its state operating license on Sept. 18, said its CEO and co-founder, Chris Perkins. He said the roughly 11,000-square-foot house on the property can accommodate up to 12 adolescent males, ages 13-17, and noted Velocity aims to serve those struggling with a myriad of clinical and behavioral challenges. Those include physical aggression, impulse control issues, depression, lack of motivation and suicidality. Expanding its scope of potential clientele will occur over time, he said.

“What we’re doing here is we are trying to create the platonic ideal of what a treatment center should be and reinvent adolescent inpatient treatment for the industry,” said Perkins, whose behavioral health experience includes nearly eight years at Calo Programs Missouri Inc., a residential treatment center for teens in Lake Ozark. There, he started as its chief operating officer before being promoted to CEO.

Even as he was at Calo, which he exited in 2021, Perkins said he had the idea for an accelerated four- to six-month inpatient program . He said Velocity plans to use a family-centered approach that meets the needs of the family as opposed to just the patient.

Short-term residential programs typically last 30-90 days, Perkins said. However, he said these types of programs are often too short to create meaningful change. Still, longer programs that treat children for 12-16 months are financially unsustainable for families.

The first patient at the treatment center arrived from North Carolina in early October, Perkins said, adding the teens will be split into cohorts of six as the program ramps up. Treatment includes a comprehensive blend of individual, family and group therapy. Daily focus on nutrition, sleep, physical fitness, stress management and spiritual grounding is included.

“We’re currently vetting patients as we speak,” he said during an Oct. 20 tour of the Marshfield center.

Controlling costs
As inpatient providers, Perkins said there are only two ways costs can be controlled. On the front end is the daily rate, while the back end is length of stay.

“It is very difficult at times to control the front end because so many of those factors are out of our control – inflation, cost of insurance, the labor market,” he said. “What we can do is control length of stay. Most of the complex patient profiles we work with, most of those kids are usually in treatment centers for a long time or they’re in multiple treatment centers. So, the total cost of care for that patient is extraordinary.”

At Velocity, the price is $1,700 a day for in-person care.

“We do work with insurance companies,” he said, noting they currently have an out-of-network insurance model. “As we gain some traction, we will then move to both an in-network and out-of-network model. We also are in the process of looking at single case agreements with state Medicaid, school districts and other funding sources.”

Perkins, who relocated to Marshfield from Lake of the Ozarks for the venture, co-founded Velocity with George Thompson, the company’s psychiatrist and chief medical officer, and Rod Andrus, chief clinical officer. Thompson resides in Overland Park, Kansas, but plans to move to the Marshfield area within the next year, Perkins said. Andrus is based in Salt Lake City.

“We have no outside money, so there’s no private equity behind us, no venture capital,” Perkins said, estimating roughly $2 million in startup costs. “We are owner-operators, which is very important for this space. So, when parents or any referring professional is speaking to the leadership team, they’re speaking to the people that are owners and operators. We control our own destiny here.”

Aside from the inpatient program, Velocity provides a six-month integrated family coaching program after the patient is discharged. Additionally, the program offers a guarantee to its patients and their families.

“If during those six months of our family coaching model, post-discharge, if the treatment team determines that our patient needs to return to inpatient care, we will bring them back for up to 60 days for free,” he said. “We have to stand behind our product because usually in mental health, people don’t do that because it’s a very opaque sort of work.”

When factoring in the free six months of coaching, officials say the cost for a full year of treatment and ongoing support is roughly $820 per day.

Staffing up
Aside from the owners, Velocity has spent the past few months boosting its staff size to 23, Perkins said. Those include a licensed clinician who’s the therapist for patients and families, a family coach and ancillary support personnel, such as a director of academics, program director and an on-site chef. Direct care employees starting pay ranges $28-$31 per hour, Perkins said. The company plans to pay therapists around $115,000 per year – well above the average $75,000 wage for the profession, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

“We are paying a professional wage because we need to professionalize this workforce,” he said, adding all of its direct-care staff will annually receive over 200 hours of professional development training.

Although the center opened with just one patient in its first few weeks, Perkins said he didn’t want to wait to assemble the company’s staff.

“Well, there’s two approaches you can take in our space, and that is you wait to get a bunch of patients and then you hire your staff, or you hire your staff and wait to have patients,” he said. “But the reality is, if you’re going to work with complex patient profiles and at the level of acuity, you have to hire your staff ahead of time.

“If you’re a parent, the last thing you want to hear is, ‘Give me your child, because we’re bootstrapping our treatment center.’”

Kristina Loveland, Velocity’s director of academics, has nearly a quarter-century of experience in education, including roughly 20 years as a teacher at Willard Public Schools.

“I really liked the model that we were starting with male adolescents,” she said, adding the program director has built in three hours of academics per day for the patients.

Velocity is partnering on curriculum with Acellus Academy, a Kansas City-based K-12 online private school.

“I’ll work directly with their home school administrators and counselors to find out where they’re at in their learning, if they have any credits they need to recover, where they need to go into their learning,” she said of the patients, with a goal to keep them on a path to hopefully graduate high school. “Then I work with the kiddos for three hours a day on their learning. So, I’ll try to get them caught up.”

But unlike schools where Loveland has previously worked, she said there’s no control-based systems such as point systems and rewards charts. The idea is to create a supportive environment and lower protective and defensive strategies for the patient to be their natural selves in an unforced approach, officials say.

“If they choose to not do the work, then I just prompt them and try to give them the skills to be autonomous and take control of their learning, their behaviors and feelings,” Loveland said.

Perkins said the intent is not to optimize the teen’s behavior while at Velocity but rather for the next several decades of their life.

“We have to create an environment where kids want to be involved, where they’re interested in doing something,” he said. “It is our job to run a true individualized program where we create a bespoke model for every patient that comes here.”

Expansion is also in the works for Velocity, officials say. Four cabins, roughly 1,800 square feet each, are planned for construction next year to expand the treatment center’s bed count to 24. Noting the cabins will all have the same footprints, Perkins said construction shouldn’t take long. Work is expected to start by March of next year and wrap toward the end of summer, he said.