A small slice of the money Tennessee dedicated to the opioid crisis this year is going to a social network developed by a Nashville startup. It’s an app designed for people in recovery.
These days, anyone in outpatient treatment for substance abuse or leaving an inpatient program is warned to be careful with social media.
“When you’re on Facebook, you’re connected to potentially people you were using with,” says Colin Polidor, who co-founded
CaredFor in 2016 with his brother, Parker.
They’ve signed contracts with a few treatment clinics around the country who needed a way to keep tabs on their alumni. The app is invitation-only and prompts users to share about their successes and hardships each day. There’s a sobriety counter prominently at the top, and when the app’s users reset it to zero, their treatment center is notified.
“Our goal is now to use data to determine what’s happening, to get them back into the app or back into treatment to support them,” Colin says.
If someone wants to contact a counselor, there’s a way to do that through the app, too.
Parker Polidor says people who’ve tried the app have stuck with it. The trouble has been getting treatment centers to incorporate the app into their discharge process.
“The biggest hurdle is getting the treatment programs to invite their patients into the platform,” he says.
Tennessee is the first state to adopt the technology, budgeting $60,000 for the program’s first year. The app, which will be branded “TN Recover,” is slowly rolling out to 270 treatment centers that receive some type of state funding, which could represent an estimated 15,000 patients.
The CaredFor team doesn’t have any clinical data showing the social network reduces the odds of relapse, but a spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Mental Health calls it a “low-cost, high-impact” response that could help people in recovery build a new support system.
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