SPONSORED SPECIAL SECTION CP DAAC
The Dr. Sushma D. Taylor Recovery Center celebrates its 1-year anniversary this fall 2025. [Duncan Garrett Photography]
on honing its treatment approach and views it as “part of what the system could be.” He juxtaposes the way traditional recovery treatment works versus other serious health conditions. “If you went to an emergency room for a heart attack, you’d expect to have follow-up care,” says Panush. “[The medical team] would find out what’s going on, have a treatment regime for you, and they would track that.” But if someone goes to an emergency department with an overdose, he points out, there’s rarely adequate managed care after they’re discharged. “If two-thirds of people coming into an emergency department with an overdose are not getting follow up, that needs addressing,” says Panush. “No other disease sees this kind of lack of follow-up care.” Adds Panush: “[Center Point DAAC] is not only addressing this from a communication standpoint but is actually bringing people together—they’re developing the relationships so you can have follow-up care, or [preventative] so people don’t wind up in the emergency room to begin with.” One of those relationships is with Sonoma County Behavioral Health Services, which oversees contracts for the various programs partnered with the county—and Center Point DAAC is among its largest contractors. When users seek admittance to DAAC’s residential program, the state requires county authorization within 24 hours, a tight window subject to bureaucratic delays. Will Gayowski, program manager at Sonoma County Behavioral Health Services, says they’ve worked with DAAC to streamline the admittance process and recent averages have been under 24 hours. Gayowski describes the county’s work with DAAC as “long and fruitful,” and that “in terms of value of service and quality it’s probably the best it’s been in years.” Gayowski credits DAAC’s growth to its ability to attract “higher quality employees.” “DAAC has a really strong partnership with our federally qualified health centers, so they get good MDs,” says Gayowski. “They’ve built up their medical model and are having a more medically directed and supported withdrawal experience that’s safer and more effective.”
improved treatment outcomes, they can convert that model to counties similarly situated to Sonoma—such as Fresno, another medium-sized county surrounded by rural counties. Geiger's plan involves working through Partnership Health Plan’s network of agencies to replicate the changes being implemented at DAAC. Through greater collaboration between agencies that interface with clients, Geiger hopes to establish stronger referral relationships making it easier to identify the barriers keeping addicts from treatment and develop plans to remove them. 'The stakes are higher' Meanwhile, the synthetic opioid crisis continues to claim lives. An estimated 7,137 people died from a fentanyl overdose in California in 2023, according to the California Department of Public Health. While the 2024 fentanyl-related deaths were down to just under 5,000 statewide, health experts are cautious to assume the tide has turned on the opioid epidemic, says Dr. Kristin Kolbinski, clinical director at Center Point DAAC. For instance, she says, a certain amount of fentanyl-related deaths may have been replaced by those from other emerging drugs like kratom. If anything, the opioid crisis is becoming more urgent. “We need to reach [addicts] on multiple levels, by any means necessary,” says Geiger. From his formative years doping up with Hunter S. Thompson to a sober adulthood helping stem the damage of addiction, Geiger has been around drug abuse disorders nearly his entire life. But with the lethality of opioids today, “the stakes are so much higher,” he says. “We’re taking our family members, those people on the corners, those people we don’t want to talk about—and turning their lives around.” And if we can’t reach those people in time? Says Geiger: "Assume that they’re going to go out and kill themselves.” n
The Medi-Cal question Client safety is the “lens” through which DAAC views its mission, says Geiger. “The decisions we make need to be client oriented—for the client’s recovery and safety.” But that lens could become foggier in 2026 when changes to federal spending on health care go into effect. More than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid spending are expected over the next 10 years, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the recent legislation known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Those cuts will trickle down to such state programs as Medi-Cal, potentially making it challenging for Center Point DAAC to sustain the high level of care that makes its programs successful. “We’ll need to have a plan to address that,” says Geiger. Meanwhile, at the top of DAAC’s priorities is public outreach—to let people know their services are available, far and wide. “The more information we can bring, the better,” says Denis. There’s misinformation about “the fear of withdrawal— how bad it’s going to be—which could be enough to scare people away from taking the first step.” But medication-assisted treatment mitigates all that, he says, and “there are a lot of people who are simply not aware.” Establishing a network Beyond Sonoma County, DAAC has an agreement with Partnership Health Plan of California—a nonprofit which networks with local providers such as DAAC to administer Medi-Cal benefits—to take client referrals from seven Northern California counties. It’s part of DAAC’s vision to address addiction from a statewide perspective; the nonprofit is working under the theory that many of the bureaucratic problems in recovery stem from local agencies working in silos, not as part of a broader network with the same goals. “We want our marketing efforts to reach people so they can raise their hand and say, ‘I’m ready for help,’” says Geiger. DAAC’s goal, he says, is to raise its baseline number of clients, while tracking and improving the timeframe for getting them into treatment. Once DAAC establishes its data of
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November 2025
NorthBaybiz 41
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