Using A-CHESS, recovering addicts can quickly connect with support groups and counselors, track their progress, and get warnings when they’re nearing locations that could tempt a relapse.
Erin describes her life before heroin as good. She was a proud mother with a good job, and close to her family. That all quickly unraveled.
First, Erin (Isthmus is withholding her last name for privacy reasons) lost her driver’s license. Shortly after that, she was arrested, lost her job, had more run-ins with the police, and eventually overdosed.
“I just lost so many things, and I was scared, I was scared for my life,” says Erin, who lives in New England. “I knew in order to get back what I had, I had to make a change.”
While she had tried to get sober before, it wasn’t until her doctors treated her disease in several ways that she began recovering. Her treatment regimen includes enrollment in a methadone program, outpatient care and the use of a new smartphone app called A-CHESS, created by a UW-Madison professor.
Addiction CHESS, or A-CHESS, is designed to aid recovery and prevent relapse for people after they leave treatment for substance-use disorders.
On a smartphone, patients like Erin can participate in online support groups, access meditation tools and articles about addiction, message counselors, locate nearby meetings for Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, and track their recovery through surveys that monitor progress.
The app also features a non-emergency support beacon and a GPS notification system that alerts a patient when they near establishments like a tavern that may trigger their urge to use.
Roughly one in seven people in the U.S. is expected to develop a substance use disorder at some point in their lives and of these, only 10 percent receive addiction-specific treatment.
David Gustafson, UW-Madison emeritus professor of engineering, developed A-CHESS almost 15 years ago. He wanted to address what he calls the ”failing addiction treatment system.”
The app has since shown some positive results.
For those with alcohol-abuse disorders, risky drinking days for A-CHESS users were reduced by 57 percent compared to those not using the app, Gustafson says. Those using A-CHESS also doubled the average amount of time they stayed in treatment.
Christopher Wilkins utilized A-CHESS when he was the CEO of Loyola Recovery Foundation in western New York. Working with veterans dealing with substance-abuse disorders, he hoped combining the app with addiction medication and peer support would minimize their hospital visits.
“I had a population of about 43 veterans that were in detox all the time and frankly not getting better. I fashioned the idea that if you could take Dave’s smartphone app on top of all the other care, that you could stop these folks from coming to the hospital, that they’d get more stable,” Wilkins says.
At the end of a three-year trial in 2014, Wilkins saw a 71 percent reduction in hospitalizations.
In 2014, Gustafson and Wilkins founded CHESS Mobile Health Inc. to offer commercial access to the app.
Since then, the company has sold 5,300 licenses across 17 states and Washington, D.C. They also have a project in Canada and one in the works in New Zealand.
“The product is really valuable for patient support, but it’s also very valuable because caregivers can manage their patients better,” Wilkins says. “In [less than three years], the system has developed 4 million data points about sleep, anxiety and relationships, data that will help us understand how to take care of people better.”
Dr. Randy Brown, an associate professor in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, is one of those caregivers.
Utilizing the clinician dashboard, Brown was able to see how his patients were doing before they even stepped foot in his office.
“I could see what areas were going really well and offer congratulations, and I could see areas where they were struggling and spend more time exploring that,” says Brown. “It really led to some challenging interactions because people would get pretty emotional, but that’s what needs to happen…. It made those office visits, that precious chunk of time, worth more.”
Brown also noticed his patients gravitate toward discussion boards. “The support network that the app generated seemed to overcome barriers for some particularly vulnerable folks with histories of trauma that make them feel really uncomfortable sharing with a group in person,” Brown says.
While Erin is comfortable participating in groups, she finds the 24-7 availability of the app’s support groups paramount during times she is struggling. She has been sober for about four months now and says the app has helped prevent her from relapsing.
“When I starting using the app, I had been clean for maybe a month and I didn’t have much of a support system. When I was having tough days, I could log on, post what I was going through and people would comment with encouragement, suggestions, groups I could go to, or just share stories about what they went through,” says Erin. “It made me realize that I’m not alone.”
By commercializing the app, Wilkins and Gustafson hope to reach at least half a million people struggling with addiction.
“Smartphones are the most ubiquitous thing on the planet, billions of people have them and using that power to get information to people when they’re feeling overwhelmed, to get information to their caregivers when that person is feeling overwhelmed, and having them work together to fight off the problem is far better than running to the accident after it happens,” Wilkins says. “It’s like grabbing the wheel before the car goes off the road.”