Project Free

The short picture on Project Free (Trenton, NJ): The facility offers specific levels of care: Dual Dx. The longer picture — clinical framework, payer mix, outcomes — takes a few specific questions to surface.

Care levels at Project Free

What Project Free offers: The facility's documented care levels are The facility offers specific levels of care: Dual Dx. — each of which is appropriate for specific clinical presentations. Matching the level to the specific clinical need is the pre-admission work. What matters is whether that matches the specific clinical picture, which only a proper assessment can tell. Most mismatches happen when the assessment is skipped or done inside the facility with a commercial interest in admission.

Insurance and payment

Project Free accepts both Medicaid and commercial insurance, which is the broadest payer profile and typically correlates with programs that operate at scale across the economic spectrum. The facility also accepts TRICARE or military benefits. The uncomfortable truth about insurance at most treatment centers is that admissions staff and the utilization-review team sometimes have different understandings of what was promised. Written VOB forces those understandings into alignment.

Specialty programming

The facility's documented specialty programming includes: Young adults, Clients with co-occurring mental and substance use disorders. "Specialty track" is a marketing category often; it becomes a clinical category when specific clinicians deliver specific programming for a documented number of hours per week. Ask for those specifics.

Before you call

Questions that matter before admitting to Project Free: ASAM level of care (not the facility's category, the clinical level); written VOB; MAT policy. If the clinical situation involves opioid use disorder, confirm explicitly whether Project Free offers medication-assisted treatment — buprenorphine, methadone, or naltrexone. Programs that do not are operating outside the current standard of care. The ones who answer those quickly are usually the ones worth considering. The ones who dodge are almost always worth skipping.