by Michelle Crouch and Charlotte Ledger, North Carolina Health News
October 17, 2026
Key takeaways:
- Atrium says it’s investing $340 million over five years in mental health care, which will add another 102 beds to existing capacity in Charlotte.
- System leaders say the investment responds to a severe psychiatric bed shortage. that’s exacerbated by a lack of community-based services.
- Atrium is converting an existing building, which will speed the process, and also funding community services.
By Michelle Crouch
When Atrium Health CEO Gene Woods first visited Atrium Health’s behavioral health hospital on Randolph Road in Charlotte 10 years ago, the facility was already in need of an upgrade.
“The building was showing its age then, and it is certainly showing its age now,” he recalled Thursday.
Woods, who is now CEO of Atrium parent Advocate Health, said he remembers thinking that the staff and patients deserved a better facility. Now, a decade later, it’s finally happening.
On Thursday, Atrium announced a $340 million five-year investment in mental health care that includes a new behavioral health hospital in the University City area in north Charlotte.
The hospital will have 168 inpatient beds, including 48 for children and teens, as well as a mental health emergency department, outpatient services, device-based therapies and programs for people who need intensive treatment but don’t need to stay overnight. It’s expected to open in 2028.
Once the hospital opens, Atrium will move the 66 beds at its existing Randolph Road center to the new facility – meaning it will add a net total of 102 beds.
“This $340 investment reflects our conviction that mental health deserves the same level of care, expertise and focus as any other area of health care,” Woods said at an event announcing the initiative.
The expansion comes as North Carolina struggles with a critical shortage of psychiatric facilities in Charlotte and across the state. Patients in crisis have been stranded for days or weeks in hospital emergency departments – a highly stressful environment for someone in a mental health crisis – while they wait for a bed to become available.
Over the past six years, Atrium’s mental-health-related ER visits have increased 13 percent, the hospital said, with adolescents accounting for 17 percent of those visits.
“Right now, at the end of every day, with all of our beds full, we still have about 50 patients waiting in our emergency rooms,” said Lisa McCanna, vice president of the behavioral health service line at Atrium Health. “So the first thing is getting people more quickly to a place where they can receive care.”
Other efforts to address the shortage are underway. In east Charlotte, the Katie Blessing Center is scheduled to open in 2027, with 72 psychiatric treatment beds for children and teens, as well as a behavioral health urgent care and outpatient services. It will be the largest pediatric behavioral health facility in the state.
In the Triangle area, UNC Health opened a behavioral health facility for youth in Butner in 2023, and Raleigh-based WakeMed – which is pursuing a combination with Atrium – plans to open a 150-bed psychiatric hospital in Garner in 2029, adjacent to a new acute care hospital.
Converted from an existing building
Instead of building the hospital from the ground up, Atrium is spending $200 million to convert a 159,000-square-foot, four-story office building into the new facility. Officials said that allows them to open up 12 to 18 months sooner.
The building was completed in 2021, but no tenants ever moved in. Atrium purchased the property for $24.5 million in September 2026. The hospital is expected to employ about 800 people.
Atrium said the new hospital will accept Medicaid, uninsured patients and those who are involuntarily committed.
NC Health News has reported that private psychiatric hospitals can turn away patients who don’t meet their clinical, safety or insurance criteria. State-run psychiatric hospitals, by contrast, serve patients regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay.
In addition to opening the hospital, Atrium officials said the system will spend about $140 million on community-based mental health services and training programs to address the shortage of behavioral health workers. That includes school-based therapy services, its street psychiatry program and day hospital programs in other parts of the Charlotte region, including rural and underserved areas.
Cherene Caraco, director of Promise Resource Network, a mental health agency based in Charlotte that is run by people who’ve experienced the mental health issues firsthand, emphasized that expanding mental health services outside the hospital is what can make the biggest difference on the rate of inpatient admissions.
For instance, she said that for a similar investment, the state could stand up at least one peer-managed crisis respite center in each of the state’s hundred counties, with each facility serving 20 people a month for 10 days each.
“The cost per person after is around $650/day per guest versus an average [of] $2,700/day hospital stay,” she wrote by text to NC Health News.
Promise Resource Network has established one of these respite centers in Charlotte, one in Raleigh and is planning others. Several other community-based programs have created such facilities in Winston-Salem and Asheville.
“We found that NC Medicaid and NC state and local governments could save $61 – $771 per person per day, and commercial insurance could save $820 – $1,016 per person per day by funding and diverting people to respite services,” instead of taking them to a hospital emergency department, she wrote.
Those resources “can prevent people from coming to the ER in the first place,” she said.
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