Our Story
In the spring of 2008, our founder - then a regional vice president for a Northern California hospital system - sat through her sixth quarterly review of unfavorable readmission data on patients with substance use diagnoses. The pattern was the same one she had been watching for years: patients stabilized in the emergency department, discharged to treatment options that ranged from punitive to luxury-priced to wrapped in shame, and back through the same emergency department three months later. After a particularly difficult conversation with the family of a patient who had not made it back, she resigned her corporate role and began the eighteen-month process of building what RBH Rehab eventually became.
The first patient walked through our East 3rd Avenue doors in September 2010, after the founding partnership with three local clinicians and a hospital system referral relationship had stabilized the operations. Eighteen years and 7,100 patients later, the founder still chairs the clinical advisory board, and the founding question still organizes the work: what does treatment look like when the program is built around what actually helps patients steady, not around what fits the existing reimbursement structure?
RBH stands for "Recovery, Belonging, Honesty" - the three words our founder posted in the staff break room during the first month of operations and has not taken down since.
Our Mission
Our mission is to deliver clinically rigorous addiction treatment that meets the whole person - body, history, family, work, faith, and the future they are trying to protect.
Whole-person transformation is not a slogan at RBH. It is a clinical commitment that shows up in how we structure the day. The medical work treats the body. The therapy work addresses the patterns and the history. The vocational programming protects the working life that recovery has to return to. The cultural-humility work meets the patient inside their own background and language. And the spiritual exploration makes room for whatever framework - religious, secular, traditional, or evolving - the patient brings to the question of meaning.
None of these are extras. They are the architecture of treatment that holds.
Treatment Philosophy
Three clinical pillars structure the work at RBH Rehab. Each is visible in daily programming.
Cultural Humility
San Mateo County is one of the most diverse counties in California, and our patients arrive carrying widely varied cultural, linguistic, religious, and family contexts. Cultural humility is not a one-time training. Our staff complete annual coursework in culturally responsive care, and our admissions and clinical teams coordinate language access in Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, and Vietnamese as a routine matter, not an exception.
Spiritual Exploration
For some patients, sustained recovery requires a renewed relationship with a faith tradition they had stepped away from. For others, it requires building a secular framework of meaning. For still others, it involves something in between, often hard to name. Our chaplaincy and counseling staff are trained to support all of these without imposing any of them. Twelve-step participation is one option among several; we also integrate SMART Recovery, Refuge Recovery, LifeRing, and explicitly secular peer-support structures.
Family Systems Theory
Addiction reshapes the family system around the patient over months or years, and recovery requires the system to change with the individual. Our family programming is grounded in family-systems theory - Bowen, structural, and contextual frameworks - and runs through scheduled clinical sessions that include the family members closest to the patient.
Our Team
Marisa Donohue, MBA, MPH
Founder and Chair of Clinical Advisory Board
Founder of RBH Rehab. Marisa spent twelve years in regional healthcare leadership before resigning her corporate role in 2008 to build the program she could not find for the patients her hospital system was discharging. Trained in public health and healthcare administration at Berkeley, she chairs the clinical advisory board, oversees outcomes measurement, and still hosts a Friday morning admissions meeting once a month.
Dr. Hannah Cho, MD
Medical Director
Board-certified in addiction medicine and internal medicine. Dr. Cho joined RBH from Stanford Health Care in 2017 to lead the medical detox wing. She sets withdrawal protocols, chairs weekly clinical rounds, and personally reviews every dual-diagnosis admission with the psychiatric team.
Esteban Alarcon-Reyes, LMFT, CADC-II
Clinical Director
Esteban directs the residential and outpatient therapy curricula and leads the cultural-humility training cycle for the entire 67-person staff. A licensed family therapist with subspecialty training in family-systems work, he designed the family programming structure that anchors the residential week.
What Our Alumni Say
"This was my fourth treatment center in nine years. Each previous attempt had ended the same way - I would graduate, feel optimistic for six to ten weeks, then find myself back in the same patterns. What was different at RBH was the intake conversation. Dr. Cho went through each of the prior attempts with me honestly - what had worked for any period, what had triggered the relapse - and built a plan around the actual data instead of starting fresh. I have been sober seventeen months. For the first time, I can imagine the next seventeen."
- Renata B., residential alumna, 2024
"I was twenty-six, working in tech in Foster City, and I had been functional enough at my drinking that nobody had really noticed. The night I drove home with a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit, I knew I had to do something before something happened. RBH met me where I was - they did not require me to hit a bigger bottom before they took me seriously. I finished 45 days residential during my company's medical leave and went back to work the following month. Two years sober."
- Quentin W., residential alumnus, 2024
"Sixteen years on the badge in San Mateo County. The job had given me a vocabulary of fear and anger I could not put down at the end of a shift, and the drinking that started as decompression had become its own emergency. RBH put me in a peer cohort with two other officers and a paramedic for the first three weeks of my stay. I never had to explain myself. The trauma-focused therapy actually moved something I had been carrying for a decade. I am still on the force, three years sober, and now I run our department peer-support group."
- Anthony D., residential alumnus, 2023