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Start-ups are adapting the tactics of the technology industry to try to help opioid addicts. The devastating public health crisis took the lives of 130 people a day in 2017. And now the US government, doctors, and health insurers are hunting for new ways to cope.
Sober Grid started as a social network for recovering addicts, but it recently received $1m in research funding to expand the platform and to look at how it can use data to intervene when addicts are at risk of relapse.
So we worked with funding from the National Institutes of Health and with the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania last year to demonstrate feasibility on natural language processing of our data to see that we could predict accurately if someone was at a heightened risk of relapse with opioid use disorder, or more broadly, substance use disorder.
And we demonstrated feasibility. And now we're going to be doing a randomised comparison trial with Perelman School of Medicine over the next two years that's going to be testing both our artificial intelligence and predicting that, along with our state-certified recovery coaching.
MedicaSafe is taking a leaf out of the internet of things playbook. It's creating a connected device that delivers medication.
We're leveraging secure medication cartridges, preloaded and approved by the FDA, ultimately, in combination with what we call Smart Key, that guides and tracks the patient as they go through treatment.
So the MedicaSafe device is sent to the patient through the mail. And they have the PIN, and they can unlock it. And it's a smart device beaming data to the cloud.
Then they also get sent cartridges, which has the treatment medication in for opioid use disorder. Then they put in the cartridge like that, and then they can press dispense, and a pill comes out. Just one a day. And now the doctor knows that I've taken that pill.
By providing prescribers with actionable information to help them risk stratify, that allows prescribers to be more comfortable treating this patient population, which otherwise is underserved.
But the entrepreneurs face challenges from both the health and tech industries. Like pharma companies, they must invest in research to prove their efficacy. And like tech companies, they face questions about how they use personal data.
