Reeve Waud’s Acadia Healthcare and Orlando Health Break Ground Near Orlando

A stretch of South Orange Blossom Trail in Apopka, Florida, became the site of a new behavioral health project when Orlando Health and Acadia Healthcare held a groundbreaking ceremony for a 144-bed hospital. The address, 1452 S. Orange Blossom Trail, will house a facility built through a partnership between the regional health system and the company Reeve Waud founded in 2005.

Central Florida has grown quickly, and with that growth has come rising need for inpatient behavioral health care. Orlando Health announced the project as a way to meet that demand closer to home, and it chose Acadia Healthcare as the operating partner. Reeve Waud started Acadia two decades ago on the idea that health systems and specialized behavioral health operators could accomplish more together than either could alone, and the Apopka event put that idea into the ground, literally.

A Site Chosen for Access

The 144-bed hospital gives the Orlando area a dedicated behavioral health facility rather than beds carved out of a general medical campus. Its location along a major corridor in Apopka places it within reach of a large and expanding population, which was part of the reasoning Orlando Health gave when it introduced the plan.

According to Orlando Health’s own announcement, the partners held the groundbreaking ceremony with the hospital slated to open in spring 2025. The project stands as its own initiative between Orlando Health and Acadia Healthcare, distinct from the five joint-venture openings Acadia completed elsewhere during the year. For families in central Florida, the promise was straightforward: a new place to seek help, built for that purpose from the start.

The Founder’s Approach, Still in Motion

Acadia Healthcare describes its growth through five pathways, including joint ventures with health systems, de novo construction, and expansions of existing sites. The Orlando Health project fits the joint-venture pattern that has become a signature of the company Reeve Waud created.

Reeve Waud, who is Founder and Managing Partner of Waud Capital Partners in Chicago, doesn’t oversee Acadia Healthcare’s everyday operations. What he did was set an early direction, and the Apopka hospital shows that direction holding steady. Orlando Health brought its regional presence and its understanding of the market. Acadia Healthcare brought the behavioral health programs and the experience of running such hospitals nationwide. Together they turned a plot of land on Orange Blossom Trail into the beginning of a hospital, and central Florida gained a resource it had been short of for years.