SBIR Phase II: User Application and Backend Portal to Enhance and Measure Addiction Treatment and Recovery Efficacy

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to further develop the technical functionality of its cohort recruitment tool that will advance efforts to launch a production quality substance abuse disorder (SUD) research platform designed for use by addiction researchers at universities, academic medical centers, and commercial sector where U.S. publicly-funded research on addictions exceeds $1.4 billion per year. The project will enable the company to contribute directly to broader societal goals of reducing the negative effects and costs of substance abuse, addiction, and treatment services to individuals from all sectors of society (e.g., minorities, veterans, etc.) by enabling addiction researchers to surface novel and more effective addiction recovery supports and interventions essential to enhancing health outcomes and controlling health care costs. The enhanced functionality will provide SUD researchers and stakeholders a unique platform to study and leverage existing evidence to improve treatment protocols, policies, and financing to improve addiction recovery outcomes. Developing the product will enable the company to combine its large mobile recovery community with state-of-the-art research tools that provide significant value to addiction researchers and demonstrate effectiveness to public and private health insurers ? two important target customers. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will aid researchers in surfacing novel technical interventions and support scientific methods to improve population health outcomes. Although technologies are emerging to help address recovery support, these have not yet met their full potential for addressing the needs of people striving 24/7 to stay sober, the needs of practitioners including SUD researchers intent on supporting their recovery, and the desire for health insurers to incentivize best practices and to improve health and control costs. The research objectives include expanding on its proof-of-concept for a cohort recruitment tool by building, testing, and implementing a production-ready open-source research platform with enhanced features for conducting scientific studies including participant assessment and intervention scheduling, advanced cohort selection and prospective assignment features, automated study management features, a white label comparison app, highly scalable architecture enabling very large studies, flexible data hosting and management capabilities, and secure software update infrastructure. The result will be an extensible, scalable, and open-source software tool for conducting a broad variety of scientifically rigorous behavioral research studies, including clinical trials. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.