Tecsys Pledges $5M to Prisma Health's New Easley Psychiatric Hospital

Tecsys Inc. pledged $5 million over five years to Prisma Health's new behavioral health hospital under construction near Easley, South Carolina, a gift the health system called the largest philanthropic contribution to behavioral health in its history. The 112-bed hospital is scheduled to open in March 2027 and is intended to pull psychiatric care closer to families across the state's Upstate region.

The donation, announced October 7 at a press conference at the hospital site, comes as Prisma Health works to close a bed shortage that state and health system officials say forces hundreds of patients a year to travel across South Carolina for inpatient psychiatric care.

What the hospital will hold

The three-story, roughly 135,000-square-foot facility sits on a 46-acre campus off S.C. Highway 153 near Easley and carries a price tag of about $138 million. Licensed for 112 beds, it will replace Prisma Health's 65-bed Marshall I. Pickens Hospital in Greenville.

According to Tecsys, the hospital will quadruple the number of child and adolescent behavioral health beds Prisma Health currently operates in the Upstate and double the system's overall inpatient behavioral health capacity. The opening date falls 58 years to the day after Marshall I. Pickens admitted its first patients.

The distance problem

More than 3,300 behavioral health patients, children among them, were transported as far as the South Carolina coast last year because the Upstate lacked enough licensed psychiatric beds, according to the health system. The new hospital is designed to cut that travel.

"Tecsys' support is helping bring to life a transformational project that will change behavioral health care in the Upstate for decades to come," said Mark O'Halla, president and chief executive of Prisma Health. "With the support of the State of South Carolina, our community and partners like Tecsys, we can reduce that burden and help more people get the care they need closer to home."

Tecsys is a Montreal-based supply chain software company that already works with Prisma Health on technology. Its chief executive, Peter Brereton, said the company decided to contribute beyond the technology partnership once it understood the distances families were covering.

"When we understood the need Prisma Health is addressing with this hospital, particularly for children and adolescents who may have to travel hours from home to receive care, we wanted to do more," Brereton said.

A state-funded project with private help

The hospital is anchored by $100 million in one-time state funding that the South Carolina General Assembly appropriated to the Department of Health and Human Services to expand psychiatric inpatient and outpatient capacity in the Upstate. Community fundraising through the Prisma Health-Upstate Foundation's Hope Forward campaign has raised more than $9.26 million, and the Tecsys pledge adds to that total.

Company co-founder and board chair David Brereton framed the gift around access. "When we learned how far families in the Upstate were traveling simply to get their children the behavioral health care they needed, this was something we wanted to help change," he said.

Why inpatient capacity matters for addiction care

Psychiatric bed shortages ripple through the addiction treatment system, because hospital inpatient care is often the only setting equipped to manage a patient who arrives in acute crisis with both a mental health condition and a substance use disorder. The two frequently overlap — which is why treatment providers refer to them as co-occurring disorders and argue for treating them together rather than in sequence.

When beds are unavailable, patients can wait in emergency departments for days or be sent to facilities hours away, interrupting the continuity of care that treatment providers say is critical in the first weeks after a crisis. Prisma Health's child and adolescent beds are especially scarce; the system says the new hospital will expand that capacity several times over.

Prisma Health is a private, nonprofit health company with more than 33,000 employees, 20 acute and specialty hospitals, 3,166 licensed beds and 490 practice sites, serving more than 1.6 million patients a year across South Carolina and Tennessee.