Cook County Health and Hospital – The Core Center

Cook County Health and Hospital – The CORE Center is located at 2020 West Harrison Street in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of Cook County Health’s many treatment facilities in the area. The CORE Center offers many healthcare services including mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment. The CORE Center includes the Bridge Clinic, an urgent care clinic for clients with alcohol and/or opioid use disorder. The facilities accept most major insurance, Medicaid and Medicare.

The CORE Center and Bridge Clinic are only four miles from Chicago’s Millennium Park and the famous Cloud Gate sculpture, known as “The Bean.” The park spans about 25 acres and is close to the shores of beautiful Lake Michigan.

The clinic is the entry point for SUD treatment at any of the Cook County clinic sites. If you’re dealing with an urgent substance use situation, the Bridge Clinic can get you quick access to care such as medication assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder.

The clinic offers specialty services such as HIV prevention with PrEP, screening and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), birth control and lab tests. Clients have pharmacy access to low cost and sometimes free medications.

The CORE center offers primary care and multiple other services in addition to SUD and mental health treatment. The center uses a harm reduction approach in an attempt to reduce deaths from opioid overdose while improving clients’ lives.

The treatment team includes a primary care provider, a recovery coach and a licensed clinical therapist. The primary care provider offers integrated medical treatment and prescribes medication.

Recovery coaches have experience with substance use recovery. They help clients identify recovery goals and collaborate to create a treatment plan to achieve them.

Licensed clinical therapists help clients identify co-occurring mental health disorders for focused treatment. Many people with SUD have anxiety, depression, trauma or other mental health challenges. The nice thing about this network is it’s easy to find inpatient and outpatient programs to assist you in your recovery.