A 50-bed inpatient rehabilitation hospital opening in Bangor has Maine’s first new hospital license in more than 30 years.
The Encompass Health hospital at 1017 Union St. will welcome patients in early October, serving people recovering from serious injuries like strokes or amputations. Its parent company is the country’s largest owner and operator of rehabilitation hospitals.
Rehabilitation services are in high demand as Maine’s population continues to age and medical providers are in short supply, and the hospital fills a gap after Northern Light Health closed its Bangor acute inpatient rehabilitation program in 2022.
Patients staying in one of 50 private rooms in the facility, which is the company’s second in the state, will have at least three hours of intensive therapy five days a week and 24-hour nursing care.
Troy Trejo, the hospital’s CEO, said the opening not only fills a gap, but also represents an “opportunity to invest in healthcare, jobs, [and] invest in this region of our state.” He is originally from Bangor himself.
The hospital already has more than 150 staff members and plans to add more, Trejo said.
“There’s incredible demand for inpatient rehabilitation care in this part of Maine and all of Maine,” he said, adding that despite the state’s aging population, it also has some of the lower counts of inpatient rehab beds per capita in the U.S. “This hospital won’t solve for all of the demand out there, but we’re taking a big step forward,” Trejo said.
Jeff Austin, president of the Maine Hospital Association, applauded the facility’s opening at a ribbon-cutting event Thursday, saying that his predecessor never got to welcome a new hospital to the state in his 27-year tenure.
“This is a big help to the hospital community that I represent. One of the biggest challenges our members have faced over the past several years is throughput,” Austin said, noting how difficult it is for providers to find the next level of care for patients being discharged from the hospital.
A new driveway connects the hospital to Union Street between the Concord Coach bus terminal and the Midas auto repair shop. The single-story building was initially set to finish construction in 2027 but wrapped up ahead of schedule.
Most of the facility is complete, although its dialysis suite will open in the coming months, Trejo noted.
When the city’s planning board approved the construction last year, Encompass Health planned to add 30 more beds as part of a second phase of development beginning in 2028, but the possibility of an expansion is unclear.
“The site is prepared for future expansion,” Trejo said, but there is no timeline right now to do so.
The facility represents a more than $60 million investment for Encompass Health, according to Trejo. It’s the company’s 178th hospital in the country, one of many recent additions that are part of a rapid expansion.
The company, and the lucrative for-profit rehabilitation hospital industry more broadly, has faced scrutiny for some rare but serious mistakes in patient care and below-average performance on some key safety metrics tracked by Medicare.
The federal agency’s data shows that Encompass usually performs well at helping most patients return home, but the company also owns many of the hospitals with worse rates of potentially preventable, unplanned readmissions to general hospitals, the New York Times and KFF Health News reported last year.
As of three years ago, most patients admitted to rehabilitation hospitals now go to for-profit facilities, and a third of medical rehabilitation patients were admitted to Encompass hospitals.
Rehabilitation hospitals have relatively few accountability measures in place. For example, Medicare can’t fine rehabilitation hospitals for safety violations like it can for nursing homes. Their inspection reports also aren’t posted publicly for consumers to read.
Encompass Health, which is based in Birmingham, Alabama, owned 173 hospitals as of the end of 2025, meaning the Bangor hospital is the fifth it’s opened this year. The company reported nearly 13% profit in its latest annual report with a net income of $759 million, up from 11% profit the previous year.