The Emily Program/Veritas Collaborative

The Emily Program/Veritas Collaborative

The Emily Program was founded in 1993 by Dirk Miller in St. Paul, Minnesota, originally as a clinic offering outpatient eating disorder treatment. Over the subsequent two decades it expanded across the upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest, adding partial hospitalization and residential levels of care. Veritas Collaborative, founded by Dr. Anne Marie O'Melia in 2013 in Durham, North Carolina, focused on adolescent and young adult populations with specialized inpatient and residential services. In 2018, private equity firm Revelstoke Capital Partners acquired both organizations and formally merged their operations into a unified platform (per Revelstoke Capital Partners, 2018). The combined entity now covers medically intensive, weight-restoration, and step-down programming across at least ten facilities in Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Treatment models incorporate medical monitoring, individual and group therapy, nutritional rehabilitation, and family-based treatment — an integrated service mix that few competitors offer under one clinical governance structure. Cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy form the evidence-based core of their clinical protocols. The network treats patients from adolescence through adulthood, with separate programs for males and for those with co-morbid conditions such as anxiety, depression, and trauma-related disorders. Private equity backing has funded facility expansions and software systems that standardize admission criteria and outcome tracking across sites (per Revelstoke Capital Partners, 2018). This centralized operating model allows the network to negotiate payer contracts with insurers at a scale that smaller independent clinics cannot match. Philanthropic foundations such as the Emily Program Foundation provide scholarship funding for patients who lack adequate insurance coverage, a separate charitable entity that operates alongside the for-profit clinical business. The structural differentiator is the breadth of levels of care under one integrated system: from medical stabilization and residential treatment through partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, and outpatient follow-up. This vertical integration reduces care gaps for patients who would otherwise transfer between unrelated providers, a recognized barrier in eating disorder treatment. Coordination with hospital systems, school counselors, and primary care physicians occurs through standardized discharge protocols — an infrastructure investment that distinguishes the network from standalone clinics that lack step-down capacity.