Partial Hospitalization Programs in Florida

A partial hospitalization program is a full clinical day that you go home from. You attend a treatment campus through the working day, then sleep in your own bed. It is the most intensive level of care that does not involve living on site, and in Florida we run one at The Recovery Village Palm Beach at Baptist Health in Lake Worth.

This page is about that level specifically: what the week actually contains, where you stay while you attend, how a PHP differs from residential care, what the coverage conversation looks like in Florida, and how people get to the campus from around the state. If you want the wider picture of what is available across the state first, start with our guide to Florida drug rehab.

What a PHP involves in Florida

The defining feature is hours, not a building. A partial hospitalization program gives you a clinical schedule close to what residential care provides, minus the overnight stay.

Federal clinical guidance places intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization together as one of the settings on the withdrawal-management continuum, and describes that setting as appropriate for people with mild to moderate withdrawal symptoms [1]. That is the bar for managing withdrawal at this level, not the admission bar for a partial hospitalization program as a treatment level. Where withdrawal is not part of the picture at all, placement turns on the rest of the assessment, which is why an assessment comes before a placement rather than after it.

For an hours figure, the clearest published anchor is Medicare’s. Medicare describes partial hospitalization as a program for people who require a minimum of 20 hours per week of therapeutic services, set out in their plan of care [2]. That is a Medicare condition of payment rather than a universal definition, so read it as a benchmark for what “intensive” means at this level, not as a rule your own plan applies.

What a PHP is not is a lighter residential stay. The clinical content overlaps heavily. The difference is that every evening is yours, which is either the thing that makes the level workable or the thing that makes it unsuitable, depending on what your evenings look like.

Recovery Village Palm Beach: detox through intensive outpatient

The campus this page routes to is The Recovery Village Palm Beach at Baptist Health, in Lake Worth, in Palm Beach County. It runs medical detox, residential and inpatient care, a partial hospitalization program, an intensive outpatient program and aftercare planning.

That range matters more than it sounds for a PHP specifically. A partial hospitalization program is rarely the whole of a treatment episode. It usually sits after something heavier or before something lighter, and each of those moves is a point where people fall out of treatment. Keeping the moves inside one organization, with one record and often the same clinicians, removes a handover.

Medical detox sits in front of the rest of it where withdrawal is part of the picture. It is a medical stage rather than treatment: federal guidance states plainly that detoxification is not substance abuse treatment and rehabilitation in itself [3]. Our medical detox page covers what it does and does not achieve.

Medication belongs across the levels rather than at one of them. For opioid use disorder, federal guidance treats methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone as the standard of care [4], and our medication assisted treatment page explains how that carries between levels. The Recovery Village Palm Beach campus page describes the site itself.

A typical PHP day and week

The honest answer is that the timetable belongs to the campus and changes, so ask admissions for the current one. What does not change is the shape.

A PHP day is a working day. You arrive in the morning, the day is built from group work, individual therapy and case management, and you leave in the afternoon. The federal description of what fills clinical hours at this end of the continuum is the same set of evidence-based approaches used in residential care: cognitive behavioral therapy, contingency management, motivational enhancement and 12-step facilitation [4].

The week is where a PHP differs from everything lighter. Most days are treatment days. That is the point of the level, and it is why people describe it as feeling closer to residential care than to outpatient care despite sleeping at home.

Two things are worth asking about before you start. How medication is managed on days you attend, and who you call in the evening if something goes wrong, since the evenings are yours rather than the program’s.

If someone is having a seizure, is unresponsive or has trouble breathing, call 911. For a mental health crisis, call or text 988.

Housing while attending a day program

This is the question that decides whether a PHP works, and it gets asked last far too often.

You need somewhere to sleep that is compatible with what you are doing in the daytime. For someone in Palm Beach County that is usually home. For someone traveling from elsewhere in Florida, it is not, and that has to be solved before a start date is agreed rather than after.

There are three common answers. Staying at home and commuting. Staying with family close to the campus. Or supported or sober living accommodation near the site, arranged separately from the clinical program.

Ask admissions which of those they can help arrange and which you have to organize yourself, because the answer differs and the assumption is expensive. Ask early, on the first call, alongside the clinical questions.

Be straight with the assessing clinician about the housing answer. A PHP built on a living situation that is part of the problem is the wrong level, and the assessment can only account for what it is told.

PHP vs residential for Florida residents

Both deliver a full clinical day. The difference is the other sixteen hours, and that is a bigger difference than the name suggests.

Residential care suits someone whose home environment is part of the problem, someone who is early enough that the medical picture is still unsettled, or someone with no reliable way to get to a campus every day. Federal guidance describes residential programs as commonly running from a few weeks to a few months, with longer stays where the clinical picture needs them [4].

A PHP suits someone with stable housing, dependable transport, people at home who help rather than hinder, and something that genuinely cannot be paused. It also suits someone stepping down from residential care who is not ready for a lighter schedule.

The federal continuum puts these in a sequence rather than as alternatives: a short medically managed withdrawal stay, then intensive residential care, then an intensive outpatient program meeting two to five days a week for a few months, then standard outpatient care [5]. Most people use more than one of those. Our levels of care guide compares them, and our inpatient rehab and outpatient rehab pages cover the levels either side.

Where withdrawal from alcohol or sedatives is likely to be severe, the placement question is a medical one rather than a lifestyle one, and it is settled by the assessment.

Coverage in Florida: Florida Blue, Florida Medicaid and self-pay

We do not publish a coverage verdict for a named carrier, because the only accurate answer is the one your own policy gives. What a page can do is set out the rules that apply to every policy and the questions that settle the rest.

Marketplace plans sold in Florida must include substance use disorder treatment among the essential health benefits, cannot refuse you over a pre-existing condition, and cannot place a yearly or lifetime dollar cap on those benefits [6].

Parity law governs the fine print. Where a plan covers mental health and substance use benefits, the financial requirements and treatment limits applied to them cannot be more restrictive than the comparable medical and surgical ones, and the same test reaches prior authorization and similar management rules [7]. Parity has a scope worth knowing. It applies to non-federal governmental plans with more than 50 employees, to private employer group plans with more than 50 employees, and to individual-market coverage. Small-employer group plans are generally outside it, although non-grandfathered small-group and individual plans must cover mental health and substance use disorder services as an essential health benefit under the Affordable Care Act [7].

On network status, the campus speaks for itself. The Recovery Village Palm Beach at Baptist Health’s own Accepted Insurance block says it “is in-network with most major insurance carriers including Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, Humana, and United” [9]. Participation still differs between products inside one carrier, so it has to be confirmed for your own policy before admission. Statewide Medicaid Managed Care plans are verified case by case rather than assumed. If you hold Medicare, note that partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient program services both appear on Medicare’s own list of covered outpatient behavioral health services [8].

Self-pay with a payment plan is a third route and sometimes costs less than a high-deductible out-of-network claim. It helps to have a number to compare against: our own cost page puts partial hospitalization at $350 to $450 a day. That is our published range rather than a federal figure, and what a given program charges is its own to state. Our guides to whether insurance covers rehab and to how much rehab costs set out how to compare them honestly.

Transport and travel within the state

A PHP is a commute, repeated, and the commute is what breaks it.

Lake Worth sits on the Palm Beach County coastal corridor, reachable on the I-95 and Florida Turnpike corridors. For most of Palm Beach County and the northern edge of Broward, that is a daily drive people sustain.

From further away, it is not, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Someone driving up from Miami-Dade every weekday for several weeks is building a plan around the one thing most likely to fail on a bad morning.

That is a reason to raise travel on the first call rather than at discharge from a residential stay. The options are usually to do the residential phase here and step down closer to home, or to arrange accommodation nearer the campus for the daytime phase.

Our directory of campuses shows what runs elsewhere in our family, and our page on how to get into rehab covers what the first call asks. Our rehab process page follows the arc of a whole episode.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

1. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. (2006). Detoxification and Substance Abuse Treatment, Chapter 2: Settings, Levels of Care, and Patient Placement. Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series, No. 45. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64109/
2. Legal Information Institute. (2026). 42 CFR § 410.43 — Partial hospitalization services: Conditions and exclusions. Cornell Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/410.43
3. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. (2006). Detoxification and Substance Abuse Treatment, Chapter 1: Overview, Essential Concepts, and Definitions in Detoxification. Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series, No. 45. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64119/
4. National Institute on Drug Abuse. (2025). Treatment. National Institutes of Health. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/treatment
5. Office of the Surgeon General. (2016). Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health — Chapter 4: Early Intervention, Treatment, and Management of Substance Use Disorders. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK424859/
6. HealthCare.gov. (2026). Mental Health and Substance Abuse Health Coverage Options. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/mental-health-substance-abuse-coverage/
7. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2026). The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA). CMS. https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/mental-health-parity-addiction-equity
8. Medicare.gov. (2026). Outpatient Mental Health Care. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/mental-health-care-outpatient
9. The Recovery Village Palm Beach at Baptist Health. Accepted Insurance. Advanced Recovery Systems. https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/locations/lake-worth/

This page is for general information and is not medical advice. Only a licensed clinician who knows your history can tell you what is right for you. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911. For free, confidential support 24/7, call or text 988.

Author

Kevin Wandler, MD

Chief Medical Officer, The Recovery Village