Episode 8 - Technology to Take on the Opioid Crisis

Audio Journal

Technology to Take on the Opioid Crisis

When I look at my iPhone or open up my laptop, I’m like most people going to Facebook.  But unlike most people, I’m not spending very much time checking in with my friends or searching for the latest products I can’t do without.  I’m watching the posts of families in Facebook groups that I belong to that are expressing profound grief, sadness and despair over losing a loved one to overdose or their own personal struggles with addiction.  I belong to those groups because my daughter Laura overdosed and died two years ago after struggling for 15 years battling heroin, opioids and meth.

Addiction, driven in large part by the opioid crisis, is killing many of our young people at an alarming rate, decimating rural communities who lack access to treatment, costing our economy over a trillion a year, and ruining the lives of millions of families nationwide.  After processing my grief over the loss of my daughter, I decided to do something about it using the technology my company built over the last 8 years that has served countless businesses who sell services through independent sales agencies.

In my business career, I’ve become aware of technologies that are transforming medical healthcare making it easy and affordable to monitor patients in their home, have telehealth doctor visits and transmit vitals to the cloud.  I decided that it was time to see if my company’s technology could also transform addiction and mental healthcare and change the trajectory of how we extend care, monitor people struggling with the disease, improve how people recover and start to reduce those rising death rates.

The treatment industry has to find a way to make a shift and leverage technology the same way that medical healthcare has.  There are too many patients and not enough therapists to keep up with everyone that needs help, patients need better ways to access treatment remotely, the cost of treatment needs to go down, patients need to be connected to treatment longer and our understanding of the disease needs to change.

So, this year I created InterAct LifeLine, a technology company that partners with treatment providers to accomplish all of those things.  Beyond that, we support the very successful collegiate recovery communities so they can automate themselves and serve the growing number of students that need their help.  In a little less than a year, we’ve been able to transform the technology we have used in the business marketplace and launch successful pilot programs in collegiate recovery and addiction treatment.  Here is what we are doing and why it works.

InterAct keeps people connected longer.  The research is clear.  If you stay connected to a treatment program for at least six consecutive months, the chances are that relapse will go down.  Why is this critical?  The relapse rate after a 30-day stay in rehab is around 85% in the first year often in the first couple of months.  There are a lot of reasons for that alarming statistic, but the main one is that although addiction is a chronic disease, but we treat it like an acute one.  That means that once the patient looks good after rehab, we release them without a good way to have the longer-term treatment plan that they really need.

So how does InterAct’s technology keep people connected?  Technology provides programs with portal technology that automates many of the processes that staff would be required to do to run an extended care program.  Let’s take a look at how that works.

First, we help programs provide structure and accountability for their clients once they have left a residential setting.  When you go to treatment, your day is planned for you.   Your meals, therapy sessions, group meetings and even down time is scheduled, and frankly, there is a