Shift Counseling Services

Located in Grand Junction, CO, Shift Counseling Services operates in CO's broader addiction-treatment market. The facility's programming is outpatient (Outpatient), not residential. What this page tries to do is frame the specific questions worth asking, which are rarely the ones that get asked first.

Care levels at Shift Counseling Services

What Shift Counseling Services offers: Shift Counseling Services is an outpatient-focused program (Outpatient) — patients live at home or in sober living and attend treatment sessions. This level of care is clinically appropriate for mild-to-moderate substance use disorder, or for patients stepping down from residential. 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

Shift Counseling Services operates primarily on commercial insurance. The implication for patients: higher typical cost-share, potentially more intensive programming, and the full burden of MHPAEA parity-rule dynamics — including appeal rights when the plan denies. The insurance problem is almost never that treatment is uncovered — it is that the specific admission was authorized under different terms than the ones in the benefit summary. Get the Verification of Benefits in writing; everything else follows from that one move.

Before you call

Three questions for Shift Counseling Services before you sign anything: what ASAM level you are being admitted at; what the written VOB says for your plan; how the program handles MAT. If the clinical situation involves opioid use disorder, confirm explicitly whether Shift Counseling Services offers medication-assisted treatment — buprenorphine, methadone, or naltrexone. Programs that do not are operating outside the current standard of care. These three together tell you most of what a facility's about.