How the HIMS Process Works

HIMS Program Referral Form

For Pilots and Referring Partners

Please complete this form to refer a pilot to our HIMS Program or to request information regarding HIMS services.
A member of our team will contact you shortly.

About a Year to Your Medical. Here Is Exactly How That Year Is Built.

HIMS is not an open-ended limbo. It is a defined sequence with a beginning, a structure, and an end point. Lions Gate Recovery runs the treatment portion under one program and coordinates with the people overseeing your case, so you always know where you stand and what comes next.

The Part That Scares Pilots Most Is Not the Work. It Is Not Knowing How Long.

You can handle hard. The job already proves that. What wears on a pilot facing HIMS is the uncertainty: how long am I grounded, what does this actually require, and is there a real finish line or does it just go on forever. That uncertainty is what keeps people sitting on a problem until it becomes a crisis.

So here is the honest version. The path from entering treatment to regaining your medical certificate typically runs about a year. After that, monitoring continues on a schedule that gets lighter over time. None of it is improvised. Every stage has a defined purpose, and you will know what each one asks of you before you are in it.

You Step Down Through Levels of Care.
You Do Not Restart From Zero at Each One.

One Year to Your Medical. Eight Years of Monitoring. A Clear Map for Every Stage of It.

Three Connected Stages of Recovery

Treatment for a HIMS pilot generally moves through three connected stages. It begins with inpatient care, where the focus is stabilization and the start of real clinical work. From there you step down into an intensive outpatient program, which keeps the structure while you rebuild routine and responsibility. Then comes aftercare, the long tail of recovery that holds everything in place once the intensive phase ends.

Documentation That Supports Recertification

Throughout, your progress is documented and reported to your HIMS Aviation Medical Examiner on a regular schedule. That reporting is not a formality. It is the record that carries you toward recertification, which is why it has to be built correctly from the first day rather than reconstructed later. Lions Gate Recovery delivers all three stages inside one program, so nothing gets lost in a handoff between disconnected providers.

Recovery Lands Differently When
the Person Across From You Has Flown the Line.

General recovery groups do good work, but they do not know what a reserve schedule does to a marriage or what it means to lose your certificate. HIMS recovery includes peer support built for aviators, including Birds of a Feather, the pilot-specific groups where the people in the room have held the same job and faced the same fear of losing it. That shared ground is part of why the program works, and it is something a standard treatment center cannot offer.

Monitoring Lasts Eight Years, and Every Year It Asks Less of You.

Regaining your medical is the milestone, not the end of the structure. HIMS monitoring continues for roughly eight years, and it is front-loaded by design. In the first year you can expect the most contact: weekly aftercare, around fourteen random drug tests across the year, and quarterly meetings with your AME. Each year after that, as you demonstrate sustained recovery, the requirements ease. By the end of the eighth year you are released from the program.

The point is simple. The intensity is highest when your recovery is newest, and it tapers exactly as you prove the work is holding. Lions Gate Recovery stays in the picture through aftercare and coordinates with your monitoring team so the long phase does not become the phase where things quietly fall apart.

Take the First Step

Recovery Starts With a Decision

Most of our clients arrive in crisis — facing criminal charges, losing relationships, after hospitalizations. But desperation can become transformation.

You do not have to wait for things to get worse.