Mat-Su Regional Medical Center Seeking State Approval for 45-Bed Behavioral Health Hospital
The forty-five-bed behavioral health facility would be located on a 10-acre site near the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center campus near Trunk Road.
Photo Credit: Patricia Morales | Alaska Business
Mat-Su Regional Medical Center and Mat-Su Health Foundation have plans for a forty-five-bed behavioral health center. The hospital and its nonprofit co-owner submitted an application for a certificate of need, which state regulators would have to approve to allow new healthcare capacity to be built in the area.
Building on Previous Plans
This wouldn’t be Mat-Su Regional’s first foray into mental healthcare. The hospital opened a sixteen-bed inpatient adult psychiatric care wing on its third floor in 2019. But the facility had planned for—and was approved to build—an acute psychiatric care facility more than twice that size.
In June 2017, the hospital submitted a certificate of need application to build a thirty-six-bed facility with an estimated cost of more than $19 million, connected to its emergency department. The state approved the request in November of that year. Citing immediate need, hospital administrators modified the application to include fewer than half the beds and change the location from a new-construction site to a location within the existing hospital, in an effort to bring the facility online as quickly as possible. The state approved that modification in December 2018.
Current Issue
July 2025
Since the facility opened in 2019, the need for behavioral health treatment in Mat-Su has grown. The hospital states that the new facility would provide critical inpatient care for adults and adolescents, addressing a “well-documented gap in mental health services that too often forces patients to seek help far from home. It will also reduce pressure on our emergency department and improve patient outcomes.”
The new facility carries an estimated cost of $70 million and would create about fifty full-time, living-wage jobs. It would be built on a 10-acre site adjacent to the hospital campus, on Mat-Su Health Foundation land.
State law requires anyone wanting to spend more than $1.5 million to build a new healthcare facility, modify the number of beds of an existing facility, or add a new type of health service, to first get authorization from the state through a Certificate of Need application. The intent of the process is to prevent too many healthcare services from being built in an area, which the state says can raise costs and waste resources.
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