A Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP) isn’t usually associated with an actual hospital anymore, but kept the name since its first introduction nearly 100 years ago.

Instead it is the level of care that is associated with day treatment, where people receive relatively the same number of hours of care, though room and board are not directly attached.

Many programs may also offer room and board separately as part of their care continuum, but there are also as many or more people who attend PHP locally and still live at home.

What Does PHP Treatment Consist of?

PHP is essentially five or six hours of care delivered per day for five days during the week. The majority of that time is spent in group settings like other treatment, and it also should include at least one individual therapy session per week. This is how it reaches roughly the same number of clinical hours per week as residential care, but doesn’t include room and board.

Many years ago, residential programs would keep people in treatment longer and just start billing for PHP (and even lower) until insurance companies started forcing them to actually move out of the residential portion of the programs. Now there must be a physical change of space in most cases to switch from inpatient to PHP since it is considered an outpatient day treatment. If a program offers room and board for PHP clients, these are supposed to be paid for separately.