PROCare: Cloud Process Support for Opioid Recovery Participation and Learning - Project Summary
This project will develop and evaluate a reward-based opioid recovery management platform (PROCare)
designed to address two ubiquitous problems facing opioid treatment settings: poor medication adherence/
retention, and a lack of standardized and valid outcomes monitoring systems to inform care. Although
medication is the standard of care for opioid use disorder (OUD), poor adherence is a pervasive problem
associated with numerous adverse outcomes. Another widespread problem in opioid treatment settings is the
absence of standardized and objective instruments. Although monitoring of treatment response is standard
practice for many chronic conditions, addictions treatment providers have been slow to adopt these practices.
Outcomes data collected from a standardized, valid, and reliable remote patient monitoring system holds great
potential to drive clinical decision-making, and ultimately help payers, patients, and families identify programs
from which patients have been empirically found to achieve remission and experience recovery. Despite the
tremendous value in tracking adherence and documenting outcomes, monitoring efforts are often hindered by
relying on traditional methods and using existing staff to collect outcomes. The PROCare patient-facing app
and provider-facing dashboard will leverage the power of two established, but underutilized, evidence-based
approaches (contingency management/self-monitoring) to incentivize recovery and increase adherence to
buprenorphine and engagement in care plans. With automation and prompts, PROCare seeks to address
traditional barriers that have precluded uptake and widespread adoption of these two effective interventions.
Providers will simultaneously be afforded with real-time, clinically meaningful outcomes data in accordance
with national standards and best practices (measurement-based care). Remote adherence tracking and
outcomes monitoring has the potential to extend care outside the treatment office and into the patient's home.
Patients/providers will be recruited from a large state-funded behavioral health network in Miami, FL offering
medication treatment for OUD. An iterative process of build-test-rebuild will be used to develop PROCare
(Aim 1). Individual in-depth interviews will be guided by the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) methodology, which
uses the Lean Launchpad approach to developing hypotheses, then rapidly moving to continuous customer
discovery. Interviews will be conducted with a sample of licensed buprenorphine providers (n=5), and a sample
of OUD patients receiving buprenorphine (n=10). A 4-week randomized proof-of-concept pilot study will
assess feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of PROCare beta (Aim 2) using a minimum of 40 patients and
4 outpatient prescribers (Aim 2 sample will not include any patients from Aim 1 interviews). Data will be
collected at induction and throughout care using instruments with strong psychometric properties to measure
adherence, engagement, participation in routine outcomes assessment, and other relevant health outcomes.