EXCLUSIVE: The Need To Enhance Psychedelic Therapy Infrastructure, Data-Driven Solutions

Psychedelic-assisted therapies (PAT) and their potential medical benefits and applications are becoming more widely understood and accepted, which is becoming a concern that there could soon be a lack of adequate infrastructure for the practice to take place.

Healing Realty Trust (formerly Healing CREI) and HealingMaps have established an exclusive partnership to identify oversaturated clinic clusters and opportunities in the PAT clinical landscape.

Benzinga spoke with Healing Realty’s Cody Shandraw and Tyler Zakovich, president and chief real estate officer, respectively, about the topic of clinical infrastructure building.

“The traditional behavioral and mental health issues have a lot of room to really grow. In the next three to five years, we’ll start to see some major national types of healthcare chains pop up,” says Shandraw.

Businesses providing ketamine therapies won’t necessarily become major players in the field. An active investor in the space for several years, Shandraw says standard operating procedures toward diligence is "actually making sure it’s an overall mental health practice," vs. focusing on operators offering ketamine alone.

When identifying these operators, he sees three things as important: targeted (individual or group) treatments with talk therapy, aftercare that involves sleep, medication, diet, exercise, monitoring and ancillary services. 

“We want that full, comprehensive kind of package. Not just one tool but rather making sure different treatment methods are at disposal for the patient’s needs.”

Tailoring Real Estate

Shandraw says recent psychedelics clinical data shows how important talk therapy is, bringing about a real estate that is “very different” than that of a typical psychiatrist’s office -highlighting the importance of room space and facilities for patients and therapists.

Healing Realty aims for turnkey locations, in areas potentially underutilized or that don't have the same amount of patient access, identifying them through the real-time data from the HealingMaps partnership and then deciding what type of real estate works best.

In their search, the team found many former memory care facilities or birthing centers with larger rooms and bathrooms on-site to “really optimize it for the operator’s goals,” whichever their patient profile might be.

For instance, the team is actively searching for places in Colorado for a doctor working with the VA service through the TRICARE billing network which aims to offer MDMA therapy at the new center.

MDMA facilities differ from most existing ketamine infusion centers, with small treatment rooms for the 45' to hour-long dissociative trip, where the therapist is not typically present and there’s no talking component. 

Another client is a behavioral health company. “For them, it's 30, 60 or 90 days of patients actually living in these facilities,” Shandraw explained. “For such tenants, we search for 7,000 to 10,000 sq. ft. homes with the appropriate conditioning permits, so the therapy is done inside and patients aren't exposed to outside, possibly behavior-affecting influences.”

Up next:  Psychedelics Real Estate's stable business model, deal types, competition, real-time data influence and an interactive mapping overview.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay