Gaudenzia President and CEO Dr. Deja Gilbert will be a featured speaker at the 2026 PACHC Annual Conference and Clinical Summit, held October 13–15 at the Lancaster Marriott at Penn Square in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her session, “When the Economics Change Faster Than the Organization,” takes place Thursday, October 15 at 8:30 a.m.
Hosted by the Pennsylvania Association of Community Health Centers, the conference brings together hundreds of health center executives, clinicians, and operations leaders from across the Commonwealth. Dr. Gilbert’s session is built for the leaders in that room who already sense that the math has changed, and are looking for a way forward that doesn’t start with cutting care.
What the Session Covers
The presentation draws from Dr. Gilbert’s published white paper, Beginning Change Management and Organizational Turnaround in Behavioral Health, a candid account of leading an organization through transformation during a period of unprecedented funding instability, workforce shortage, and payer disruption.
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Her argument is straightforward: the forces reshaping behavioral health are not staying in behavioral health. Federal Medicaid reductions move to states. States absorb the loss or pass it down. Counties lose block grant funding. Displaced patients increase commercial utilization, and commercial payers respond by tightening authorization. Every provider in the safety net feels it. The only variable is sequence.
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Attendees will leave with a practical framework for that reality, including:
- Why traditional organizational structures buckle under sustained payer pressure
- How to read the funding cascade early enough to act rather than react
- What intentional restructuring looks like in practice, and what it costs
- How to protect clinical quality and access while the business model is being rebuilt
Grounded in Gaudenzia’s Own Experience
Dr. Gilbert will share what this looked like inside Gaudenzia: restructuring the organization while continuing to serve approximately 16,000 individuals each year across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. That included difficult decisions about programs and facilities, a disciplined sequencing of priorities, and a commitment that people in treatment would not absorb the cost of institutional change.
It is not a case study with a tidy ending. It is a working account of decisions made under pressure, offered to peers who are facing the same headwinds and deserve something more useful than optimism.
Why Gaudenzia Is in This Room
Community health centers and nonprofit behavioral health providers serve many of the same people, often at the same moment in their lives. When one part of the safety net contracts, the other feels it immediately. Sharing what we have learned, including where we got it wrong, is part of how that safety net holds.
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This is the second consecutive year Gaudenzia has brought frontline insight to statewide and national forums, alongside our 2025 FrontLine Report and Dr. Gilbert’s ongoing work on organizational transformation in behavioral health.
Attending the Conference?
If you will be in Lancaster, join us Thursday morning, and please come say hello. Dr. Gilbert welcomes the conversation as much as the questions.
Media representatives seeking interviews or additional information may contact publicrelations@gaudenzia.org.
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If you or someone you love needs help with treatment for alcohol and/or substance use disorder, please contact our Treatment and Referral HelpLine at 833.976.HELP (4357) or email helpline@gaudenzia.org.