$28 million behavioral health crisis receiving center planned for former St. Vincent Charity medical building

Monday, February 10, 2025

Tags: St. Vincent Charity Community Health Center , Sisters of Charity Health System

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The Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Cuyahoga County (ADAMHS) is partnering with The Centers and Cuyahoga County to create a new $28 million behavioral health crisis receiving center at a three-story medical building on the former St. Vincent Charity Medical Center campus. The building sits on East 22nd Street, across from the St. Vincent Charity hospital towers that are scheduled to be demolished later in 2025.

Slated to open in 2026, the facility will allow people with addiction or behavioral health conditions to get quick, easy-to-access care without having to turn to overcrowded traditional emergency departments, jails or psychiatric hospitals. The goal is to make mental health care easier to access and keep people with mental health issues out of jail.

Cleveland.com reported on this new crisis center. The full text of the article is below or available here.

Rising from St. Vincent’s closure: Plans emerge for $28M crisis center in downtown Cleveland

by Julie Washington
Cleveland.com

A new chapter in healthcare is taking shape at the partially shuttered St. Vincent medical campus in downtown Cleveland, as local leaders seek to establish what they say is a first-of-its-kind receiving center to provide immediate care to those in crisis.

The Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Cuyahoga County is partnering with The Centers and Cuyahoga County to create a new $28 million behavioral health crisis receiving center at a three-story medical building on the former St. Vincent Charity Medical Center campus.

Slated to open in 2026, the facility will allow people with addiction or behavioral health conditions to get quick, easy-to-access care without having to turn to overcrowded traditional emergency departments, jails or psychiatric hospitals, said ADAMHS board CEO Scott Osiecki.

“It’s designed to provide quick, accessible, short-term behavioral health care for individuals with a mental health or a substance use crisis,” Osiecki said. The ADAMHS Board is responsible for planning, funding and monitoring mental health services throughout Cuyahoga County.

The new behavioral health crisis center will help close the gap created by the loss of St. Vincent’s psychiatric emergency room. The hospital closed to inpatient care in 2022. St. Vincent’s psychiatric emergency department initially remained open, but closed in June 2024.

Filling the gap

The new crisis center joins other behavioral health facilities and services established in the last few years, all with the goal of making mental health care easier to access and keeping people with mental health issues out of jail.

It’s a growing need across the state.

Similar crisis receiving centers are planned for Lorain and Franklin counties, and some rural counties are joining together to create facilities to serve people across a region, said Eric Morse, CEO of the Centers, a network of Cuyahoga County health centers focused on behavioral health and early learning.

In Northeast Ohio, recent efforts to provide more care to those in crisis include MetroHealth System’s Behavioral Health Hospital and psychiatric emergency department in Cleveland Heights, the Cuyahoga County diversion center in Cleveland and a care response pilot program that will send teams of licensed social workers and peer counselors — without police — to handle select nonviolent behavioral health crisis situations in two Cleveland zip codes.

The ADAMHS Board has been involved in the management of the county’s diversion center since it opened in 2021. Stays at the 50-bed diversion center are completely voluntary, and some prospective patients can be turned away during its pre-screening process.

The proposed behavioral health crisis center will be different from the diversion center, Morse explained. People can come to the crisis center with no pre-screening, and the crisis center can take patients who are on a court-ordered involuntary hold for close monitoring.

Behavioral urgent care, peer counselors

The first floor of the behavioral health crisis receiving center will be open around the clock for walk-in patients, police and ambulance drop-offs and people who have been placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, Morse said. It will have the capacity for 40 patients.

The receiving center will provide 23 hours of care to stabilize patients undergoing a behavioral health or addiction crisis. People needing more care after that time will be sent to other psychiatric hospitals in the area.

A behavioral health urgent care department, also on the first floor, will treat patients such as a depressed person who is having suicidal thoughts, or a person who was recently released from jail but doesn’t have enough medication to last until their next physician appointment.

“We did this because it was taking people, on average, three months to see a behavioral health provider, and we want to make sure people could get care when they need it,” The Centers’ Morse said.

The second floor will have 32 beds for patients who are being stabilized and those undergoing substance use disorder detoxification. The center’s third floor will house outpatient services.

Shared vision leads to new crisis center

The three-story medical building on East 22nd Street that will house the new behavioral health crisis center was most recently owned by a real estate investment company that leased the property to St. Vincent.

The Centers purchased the campus building in 2023 with an eye towards moving its clinical services and offices there, Morse said.

When Osiecki learned of the Centers’ purchase, he pitched the idea of turning it into a receiving center instead. The ADAMHS board had previously attempted to launch one in partnership with St. Vincent and MetroHealth System, to no avail, Osiecki said.

“I shared our vision for the crisis receiving center, and (Morse) agreed,” Osiecki said. “The Centers has always been a great partner of ours, and he was happy to work with us.”

The ADAMHS Board intends to pay for $9.3 million of the facility’s $28 million construction cost, which also includes a $6.8 million capital award of American Rescue Plan Act funding from the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, Osiecki said.

Additional funds will be raised through philanthropic gifts and the federal New Markets Tax Credit program, which promotes community development and economic growth by using tax credits to attract private investment to distressed communities, Morse said.

The tax credit program is expected to raise about $5 million.

Cuyahoga County will likely provide some financial support for the project, but is still evaluating its financial participation, a county spokeswoman said.

Morse, of The Centers, described the county’s contribution as “a substantial piece of the pie.”

The ADAMHS board plans to fund the facility’s ongoing operational costs, which have not been determined, Morse said.

The proposed behavioral health crisis receiving center will employ about 200 caregivers, and is expected to serve about 17,000 people annually.

The future of the campus

While some of the St. Vincent campus is expected to be demolished, the proposed behavioral health center would complement the planned revitalization of East 22nd Street, fueled by the planned demolition of the long-vacant 1931-built Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court building that overlooks the Innerbelt freeway trench at East 22nd Street, which runs through the St. Vincent campus.

The demolition of the now-vacant St. Vincent Community Health Center’s towers and nearby buildings, slated for spring, will also open up the area for redevelopment.

St. Vincent’s governing boards looked at ways to retrofit the old inpatient towers — two wings attached to a core building — for new uses, or to find a buyer, with no success, said Michael Goar, president and CEO of Sisters of Charity health system. The hospital towers, each with seven floors, were built in the 1960s and ‘70s.

It cost $5 million annually to maintain the buildings, so the health system decided to raze most of them in the block bounded by East 22nd Street, Central Avenue, East 24th Street and Community College Avenue.

The health system doesn’t know what might be built on the cleared site, but it’s looking for future partners to help it continue to provide health care to the surrounding Central neighborhood.

“The key is, we’re not going to do it ourselves,” said Goar, who joined the St. Vincent health system in 2024. “For now, we’re just going to get rid of the buildings, and that gives us an opportunity to connect, discuss, evaluate what’s needed in the community, and meet with (potential) partners.”

The Sisters of Charity Health System, which oversaw the former hospital, still runs numerous outpatient health services in the Central neighborhood. These include outpatient addiction treatment services at Rosary Hall, a pharmacy, internal medicine and a medical respite residential facility for those experiencing homelessness.

In addition to the coalition behind the behavioral health crisis center, Neighborhood Family Practice — a network of federally funded nonprofit health centers with seven locations in Cleveland and Lakewood — has stepped up.

The organization is close to finalizing the purchase of a building on St. Vincent’s campus, but declined to give details, a spokesperson said.

Cleveland Councilman Richard A. Starr, whose Ward 5 includes Central, sees the former hospital towers site — soon to be a 10-acre parcel of cleared land — as a development opportunity.

“Just because it’s an empty lot once you tear down the hospital buildings, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be empty forever,” Starr said. “The services that the residents need will continue to be met as these different changes occur, which is very important for the neighborhood.”