Auburn Providers Land $350,000 Federal Grant to Expand Opioid Treatment

Two Auburn-based health care providers have been jointly awarded a $350,000 federal grant to expand access to medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, New York State's addiction services office announced last week. East Hill Medical Center, a federally qualified health center on Genesee Street, and Confidential Help for Alcohol and Drugs, a state-licensed outpatient clinic known locally as CHAD, will share the award, The Citizen reported.

The pairing is deliberate. One partner prescribes, the other counsels — and in a county of roughly 75,000 people, neither could stretch the money as far alone.

What the Grant Funds

Medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, pairs FDA-approved medications such as buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone with counseling. It is considered the gold standard for opioid use disorder, yet steady access to it remains patchy across upstate New York, where the nearest prescriber can be a county away.

East Hill has been building toward this for years. The health center folded addiction medicine into its primary care practice back in 2018, financing the buildout with a $170,000 grant, and it now screens and treats patients for substance use — with a focus on opioids and alcohol — alongside routine medical care. CHAD brings the other half of the model: a licensed outpatient program serving adults, adolescents, and seniors in Auburn.

Cayuga County has been quietly layering funding streams to attack the same problem. The county was part of the first wave of the federal HEALing Communities Study, dedicated $245,000 of its opioid settlement money to school-based prevention, and separately secured a $1 million grant for peer recovery support. The new award adds treatment capacity to a local strategy that until now leaned heavily on prevention and recovery.

Why It Matters Beyond Cayuga County

The grant lands as Washington keeps the spigot open for exactly this kind of program. SAMHSA's latest Medication-Assisted Treatment funding round — a $68.25 million national competition with individual awards capped at $750,000 — closed to applicants on July 27. Awards at the Auburn scale, a few hundred thousand dollars split between small providers, are how that federal money typically reaches rural Main Streets.

For residents of Cayuga and neighboring counties, the practical effect should be shorter waits and fewer long drives for a buprenorphine prescription. East Hill Medical Center operates at 144 Genesee Street in Auburn and runs a nurse line at (315) 253-8477 after hours. New Yorkers anywhere in the state can find licensed treatment programs through the OASAS HOPEline at 1-877-8-HOPENY, available around the clock.

Whether the award is renewed will depend on what federal appropriators do next — but for now, one of the state's smaller counties just got a meaningful upgrade in its front-line response to the opioid crisis.