Sixty-four thousand Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses in 2016. Drug overdose deaths have increased four-fold in the last 20 years, and the biggest contributor is opioid abuse. The opioid epidemic is real, it’s devastating, and it impacts Seattle and Washington State.

A new partnership between Evergreen Treatment Services (ETS) Opioid Treatment Program and UW is exploring how technology can support and enhance evidence-based counseling for opioid abuse. Supported by a UW CoMotion Innovation Fund pilot grant, David Atkins, PhD, and his research team, with staff support from Angela Klipsch, are leveraging recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to design assistive technologies for counselors. Their cloud-based software makes existing supervision more efficient, but their predictive analytics provide new tools not previously available in counseling. These automated quality-monitoring features allow counselors and their supervisors to track an entire counselor’s caseload and see how different clients are progressing in treatment, and which cases may need extra care and focus. The ETS Opioid Treatment Program currently serves 3,000 patients, and they provide almost 20,000 sessions of evidence-based counseling each year. With high caseloads and back-to-back sessions, counselors delivering treatment for opioid use disorder have a challenging and taxing job.

The pilot project with ETS offers the opportunity to evaluate the software in a frontline addiction treatment clinic, where the team will see both how it may improve counseling but also how it fits within clinical and supervision workflows. “Our objective is to design technology that maximizes therapist’s abilities to help their patients,” says Dr. Atkins. “The software can’t do the therapy, but it can help human counselors be the absolute best they can be.”