Q&A: Telehealth's Role in Combating the Opioid Epidemic

Bicycle Health CEO Ankit Gupta and Medical Director Dr. Brian Clear discuss the treatment landscape for patients with opioid use disorder. Regulations surrounding telehealth prescriptions of controlled substances were loosened during the public health emergency, allowing for providers and startups to offer medication-assisted treatment like buprenorphine for opioid use disorder. CEO and founder Ankit Gupta and Medical Director Dr. Brian Clear sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the treatment landscape for patients struggling with opioid use disorder and the startup's recent $50 million Series B raise. So, we know that only one in 10 patients with a substance use disorder is actually getting treatment in the past year. In our program, we find that 30% of patients reaching out to us have never been diagnosed with opioid use disorder before and have never accessed care for opioid use disorder before, which is really remarkable.

So, patients who are using illicit opioids are much more likely to overdose than they ever were in the past. We're going to use this investment to continue increasing access to opioid use disorder treatment. That includes hiring medical providers to be able to grow the capacity to see patients, building our technology that helps us both deliver the care as well as increase the quality of care through data analytics and patient engagement tools that we've built in-house through our randomized at-home drug testing program. We're seeing strong demand, both from commercial as well as from Medicaid managed care plans, to both increase access by decreasing cost of this patient population. We want to use the investment to also increase our partnerships with medical providers, case managers, discharge planners, especially in the correctional health setting but also with employers to reach patients.