Northwestern Medicine has received a $25 million donation from Kent and Liz Dauten and their family foundation to create a new behavioral health institute.
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The Northwestern Medicine Dauten Behavioral Health Institute will aim to better coordinate care and improve screening of patients, and will focus on novel diagnostic and treatment approaches across the Northwestern system, as well as research. It will also include programs for patients with complex diagnoses and disorders. Its first major initiative will be a Bipolar Disorder Center of Excellence, which will focus on providing high quality care and accelerating research into treating patients with the disorder.
Kent Dauten, chairman and co-founder of Chicago-based private equity investment firm Keystone Capital, said his family has been working for years to boost care and research related to bipolar disorder, after two of his now-adult children were diagnosed with it as teenagers.
“After taking about maybe eight to 10 years to learn as much as we could about it and get as much care and treatment for our two kids as we could, we kind of shifted gears to lean into this illness,” Kent Dauten said. “It almost felt like higher authority saying, ‘OK, this is your cause.'”
Kent Dauten said he hopes the donation and the new institute allow more people with behavioral health disorders to seek care at Northwestern, and that it helps lead to innovation and discovery. Dauten is also a member of the board of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare and was a co-founder of Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity investment firm.
“This investment allows us to really jump-start that work that we’ve already begun,” said Dr. Sachin Patel, chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern Medicine.
“It allows for all of our hospitals and clinical sites around the state to begin to come together, to work together more effectively, to synergize clinical programs and offer the same high quality care at all of our sites,” Patel said.
Demand is increasing for behavioral health services across the country, as the prevalence of behavioral health disorders in the U.S. grows, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Nearly half of Americans will experience a behavioral health condition — which can include mental health disorders and substance use disorders — in their lifetimes, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. In 2021, fewer than half of adults with a mental health issue were able to get timely care, according to the National Academies.