Here are four ways Altru is expanding its behavioral health strategy in 2025:
1. In January, the system opened a new behavioral health center in Grand Forks in partnership with Universal Health Services. The $16 million facility will increase the number of inpatient beds from 16 to 24 and opens to patients Jan. 19.
“Having a facility that’s designed and built from the ground up specifically for behavioral health offers several advantages over a hospital that’s retrofitted for a behavioral health unit,” Chief Nurse Cory Geffre, BSN, told the Herald.
2. The center will serve patients in North Dakota and Minnesota and provide programming and specialty therapies.
3. Altru is shifting its therapeutic learning center, a collaboration between the system and Grand Forks Public School, to the new center. The program helps children in kindergarten through eighth grade who have behavioral health problems, with the goal of helping them before they reach the crisis point. Students are broken into groups based on age and spend time at Altru with a multidisciplinary team that includes teachers, therapists, social workers, health coaches and other staff.
4. Altru will also divert incoming behavioral health patients to the center when appropriate rather than taking them to the emergency department.
