Digital search engine platform to improve education and access to affordable housing options and resources for recovering substance abuse patients at risk of homelessness.

Abstract Patients recovering from substance-use disorders have a greater chance for successful recovery, avoiding relapse, and integrating back into society through secure housing. Research studies have proven that the quality of housing directly impacts the likelihood for recovery. Although housing programs, grants, and other types of assistance are available for patients to search for viable housing options, these current marketplace solutions do not really provide any clear guidance to navigate the complicated and demanding home buying process. Furthermore, there is a lack of educational resources for consumers who often think they need to put more money down to purchase a home than is actually required. These challenges have created a large gap in consumer education and resources, which makes it difficult to identify and pre-screen buyers for suitable home buying programs, especially for recovering substance-use patients. Consequently, thousands of potential homeowners “walk away” from buying a home because of lack of information and inability to find a suitable program. Unfortunately, these housing challenges are also relevant to the general homebuyer population across the US, especially for low-income earners. KTOandapos;s goal is to address the significant need for better housing programs, sheltering options, resources, and search platforms specifically for recovering substance- use patients to support their journey towards sobriety. KTO is developing a digital platform designed to deliver customized information to help homebuyers identify and utilize financial resources to lower home buying costs. Our platform will address the significant gap in consumer education and traditional lenderandapos;s lack of legal obligation to provide information on suitable products to homebuyers in a straightforward, easily accessible, and affordable manner. We suspect the KTO web app will save homebuyers time (search) and money (grants and other assistance) by simplifying the process of matching buyers to resources when buying a new home. Herein this proposal, our goal is to tailor our current KTO web app platform prototype and to gather customer feedback to validate our minimum viable prototype (MVP) to meet the needs of recovering patients from substance abuse. The Phase I aims are: AIM 1: (a) Identify relevant homebuyer assistance programs in the Northeast United States by conducting short survey interviews to understand variables to consider to accommodate home-buyers recovering from substance abuse; and, (b) Translate and optimize our manual survey towards an automatized web form for recovering substance abuse patients; and, AIM 2: Recruit and identify 50 recovering patients interested in home buying options to conduct a small pilot study on our MVP to take our survey and participate in a focus group to gather feedback on the KTO web app performance and efficiency. These steps would be critical for our long-term goals to pursue a Phase II SBIR along with customer acquisition in multiple markets across the US to make home affordability more accessible for those recovering from substance-use disorders. !Project Narrative Research studies have proven that the quality of housing directly impacts the likelihood for recovery for patients recovering from substance-use disorders where those with secure housing will have a greater chance for successful recovery, avoiding relapse, and integrating back into society. However in addition to the lack of educational resources for home buyers, current housing programs, grants, and other types of assistance available for patients to search for viable housing options do not really provide any clear guidance to navigate the complicated and demanding home buying process. KTO is developing a national digital platform designed to deliver customized information to help recovering substance-use patients identify and utilize financial resources to lower home buying costs in order to support their journey towards sobriety. !