NHHA marks five years of scaling recuperative care across California, with three community care campuses, a $10 million Health Net and Centene Foundation investment, and city approval to triple capacity at its Sacramento site.
SANTA ANA, Calif., Nov. 2, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- National Healthcare and Housing Advisors (NHHA), a California-based for-profit LLC specializing in the integration of healthcare and housing for vulnerable populations, recently marked its fifth year of operation with a record of growth that few organizations in the recuperative care sector have matched. Since its founding in 2021, NHHA has established multiple Community Care Campus sites across California – in Sacramento, Long Beach, and Imperial Valley – with hundreds of beds under management and hundreds more expected to come online before the end of the year. The organization has also provided consulting services to more than 1,200 providers across 32 California counties, with active development underway in Nevada, North Carolina, Minnesota, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
At the core of NHHA's model is recuperative care – the critical bridge between hospital and community for individuals who have nowhere safe to recover after discharge. NHHA's campuses are anchored by recuperative care and layered with integrated wraparound services, including behavioral health support, housing navigation, case management, pharmacy services, day habilitation, street medicine, and community outreach. An inpatient hospital bed costs roughly $4,000 per night; a recuperative care bed costs a fraction of that, and NHHA's model has delivered per-day cost reductions of up to 95% for partner hospital systems and health plans while producing stronger outcomes for the individuals they serve. What distinguishes NHHA's approach is that it was built from the inside out – the organization takes pride in being a provider first, with every layer of its consulting and infrastructure expertise grounded in the direct experience of running these programs, understanding the acuity of the clients, and navigating the real-world challenges of funding, community support, and operational sustainability.
"We built NHHA to do what no one else was doing – to bring the infrastructure, the data, and the accountability that health plans, hospitals, and government agencies need to make recuperative care not just viable, but scalable," said Paul Leon, CEO and Founder of National Healthcare and Housing Advisors. "Five years in, we have the proof of concept. We have the partnerships. Now we build."
Partnerships and Investments
NHHA's growth has been built on the strength of its relationships with California's leading managed care organizations. In June 2026, Health Net – one of California's most experienced Medi-Cal managed care health plans and a subsidiary of Centene Corporation (NYSE: CNC) – along with the Centene Foundation, announced a $10 million investment to support the expansion of the Community Care Campus in Long Beach. The investment, which includes a dedicated Children & Families Recuperative Care program serving Medi-Cal members, underscores the confidence that major health system stakeholders have placed in NHHA's model and its ability to deliver integrated, community-based care at scale.
The Long Beach campus – developed in partnership with Encompass Housing, NHHA's nonprofit partner – reflects NHHA's approach to building sustainable, community-anchored infrastructure. NHHA secured the health plan contracts, hospital partnerships, and county and city relationships that made the site financially viable, while Encompass Housing operates services on the ground. The result is a replicable model that NHHA is now actively developing in additional markets across the state.
Anthem Blue Cross invested in NHHA's Sacramento campus through a $100,000 Housing & Homelessness Incentive Program (HHIP) grant, which helped launch the site's first 50 recuperative care beds. The campus served nearly 200 unique individuals in its first six months, and the City of Sacramento has since approved NHHA's permit to add 100 additional beds, bringing planned capacity to 150.
In Imperial Valley, NHHA operates the region's only health-plan-contracted recuperative care program – a distinction that takes on added significance given the area's evolving healthcare landscape, including the pending consolidation of ECRMC and Pioneers Memorial Hospital under the Imperial Valley Healthcare District and the $11 million state grant awarded to ECRMC earlier this year. The Imperial Valley model represents a unique three-way partnership between the county, a health plan, and NHHA – a collaborative structure that is often difficult to achieve and that NHHA views as a replicable template for closing rural healthcare gaps nationally. Both the Sacramento and Imperial Valley campuses are currently undergoing expansion.
Infrastructure and Accountability
What sets NHHA apart from other organizations working in recuperative care is not only the breadth of its programs, but the depth of its operational infrastructure. NHHA has built a centralized Referral Center, headquartered at its corporate office in Orange County and operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that manages referrals and admissions across all campus sites statewide. The center operates on a proprietary care management platform that tracks admissions, bed utilization, referral sources, and insurance coverage in real time – giving NHHA's health plan and government partners complete, continuous visibility into how funds are being used and what outcomes are being achieved.
This closed-loop accountability system, from referral and admission through service delivery, billing, and outcomes reporting, is supported by dedicated Billing, Contracting, and Compliance teams, and reinforced by a Data Team capable of producing real-time dashboards and payer-specific reporting. In a sector where transparency and financial accountability are often inconsistent, NHHA has made both non-negotiable. The organization only bills for services actually delivered and works actively to ensure that every dollar spent by a partner health plan or government agency is traceable to a measurable outcome.
Beyond its direct care campuses, NHHA provides consulting, technical assistance, and organizational infrastructure to nonprofits and healthcare providers seeking to develop or expand recuperative care and housing programs. Services include grants management, data and analytics, executive coaching, a case management training curriculum, and a proprietary Safety & Stabilization Counselor certification program. NHHA has provided this infrastructure support to more than 1,200 providers across 32 California counties.
NHHA's recuperative care program holds current certification from the National Institute for Medical Respite Care, the field's national standards body.
Leadership
NHHA was founded by Paul Leon, RN, BSN, PHN, FAAN – a registered nurse and public health professional who has spent more than two decades building, scaling, and advocating for systems of care for California's most vulnerable populations. Leon previously founded Illumination Foundation, which he grew from a grassroots effort started in his garage into a $60 million, top-ten nonprofit in Orange County, California, recognized as one of the largest providers of recuperative care in the United States. He left Illumination Foundation in 2021 to launch NHHA with a singular focus: building the infrastructure, systems, and partnerships needed to scale the recuperative care model nationally.
Leon is widely recognized as one of the early pioneers of both Street Medicine and recuperative care in California. Nearly 30 years ago, he and Dr. Clayton Chau – who now serves as NHHA's Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer – built the first Street Medicine team in Orange County after identifying critical gaps in care for individuals experiencing homelessness through their work with the County. That partnership, built on decades of shared clinical and administrative experience, now anchors NHHA's strategic vision.
In 2023, Leon was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN) – the most prestigious recognition in the nursing profession, awarded to fewer than 3,400 individuals who have made extraordinary and sustained contributions to health and healthcare policy. He was selected as one of only two experts invited to represent recuperative care at the Sacramento County Healthcare Forum in August 2026, an invite-only convening of managed care plan executives and hospital leadership. Leon also spoke at the State of Reform conference in Minnesota in September 2026. He currently serves on advisory committees at UC Irvine's School of Nursing and the Mental Health Association of Orange County, teaches at USC's School of Social Work and UCI's School of Medicine, and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council (NHCHC).
Culture and Execution
NHHA launched its Sacramento Community Care Campus in less than five months – a timeline that required cross-functional collaboration across every part of the organization and that Leon and his team describe as a direct expression of NHHA's culture. The organization also built the first-of-its-kind centralized recuperative care referral center in under one month, mobilizing staff across departments to define the model, select the team, and launch operations from scratch. These are not anomalies. They reflect an organizational culture built on four principles: relentless drive, collaborative execution, an unwavering commitment to its clients, and a continuous push to improve and innovate – not to meet the standard, but to exceed it.
NHHA operates on what it calls a multi-generational leadership model – a deliberate approach to bridging the experience of its most senior leaders with the energy and perspective of emerging team members. Seasoned leaders with decades of hands-on experience in recuperative care, street medicine, and nonprofit management mentor and guide early-career staff, while next-generation team members are given real ownership of initiatives and room to lead. The result is an organization grounded in what actually works while remaining genuinely open to new thinking – each generation, in NHHA's words, strengthening the other.
NHHA's operational philosophy is straightforward: if it is the right thing to do for the client, it is the right thing to do. That standard, applied consistently across campuses, consulting engagements, and health plan partnerships, is what the organization points to as the foundation of its growth.
"The work we do every day – launching a campus in five months, building a referral center in under a month, serving a client who has nowhere to go after a hospital discharge – that's not extraordinary to us. That's the standard we hold ourselves to," said Leon. "Vulnerable populations don't have time for organizations that move slowly or that aren't accountable. We built NHHA to be neither."
About National Healthcare and Housing Advisors
National Healthcare and Housing Advisors (NHHA) is a for-profit LLC, founded on over two decades of working with some of the most complex and vulnerable populations. NHHA has a proven track record of providing equitable, community-centered housing and healthcare consulting and administrative services supporting the work of non-profits, health plans, and government agencies. NHHA's work further extends to the implementation of direct care programs for historically underserved communities, including people experiencing homelessness, seniors, justice-involved individuals, Medicaid and Medi-Cal enrollees, and those with complex medical, behavioral health, and social needs including serious mental illness (SMI) and substance use disorder (SUD). NHHA develops and operationalizes Community Care Campus models across California and beyond that integrate healthcare, housing, and supportive services in a single coordinated system, advancing scalable, whole-person solutions that improve health outcomes and accelerate pathways to housing stability. To learn more, please visit nhhadvisors.com.
Media Contact:
Miki Akil
Kue Studio PR on behalf of National Healthcare and Housing Advisors
[email protected] | 832.260.4414
Media Contact
Miki Akil, Kue Studio, 1 8322604414, [email protected], kue.studio
Miki Akil, VERVE Public Relations, 1 8322604414, [email protected], www.vervepublicrelations.com
SOURCE National Healthcare and Housing Advisors
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