Ashley Addiction Treatment Center Uses WHOOP Unite

A History of Innovation

For nearly 40 years, Ashley Addiction Treatment (Ashley) has been a nationally-recognized leader in evidence-based treatment of substance use disorders (SUDs). Ashley takes a holistic and personalized approach to treatment that combines clinical, medical, and spiritual care tailored to the individual needs of every patient. The organization has achieved a number of firsts in its time, including being the first recovery center to offer a relapse program and the first to incorporate patient biometrics to enhance the quality of care and improve patient outcomes.

Ashley is trying to change that by conducting research in partnership with faculty from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to identify signatures or phenotypes of treatment trajectory that are predictive of relapse susceptibility. As a part of routine care at Ashley, patients are required to complete momentary standardized assessment batteries to measure psychometric trends of pathology and resilience. The biometric data obtained from WHOOP will supplement this data as an objective measure of healthy recovery. Ultimately, it will enable Ashley and faculty from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to identify new treatment protocols that reduce stress triggers for relapse, lead to better outcomes for patients, and add to the body of knowledge around SUD treatment. Ashley chose WHOOP Unite as its technology partner in the study.

Overcoming Challenges in Addiction Research

There are a number of specific challenges in deploying wearables in an inpatient setting like Ashley. First, access to cell phones by patients is strictly prohibited for patient safety. Ordinarily, wearable devices, including WHOOP, transmit their data to the cloud via a user’s cell phone, but this was not an option in this case. Second, patient data falls under HIPAA regulations, so the data had to be secure and de-identified to anyone on the platform except for the patient’s primary counselor and Ashley’s data personnel. Finally, staff time is limited so they needed a solution that could scale to hundreds of patients without placing an undue burden on staff to administer devices, keep them charged, and onboard and offboard patients.

Prior to partnering with WHOOP Unite, Ashley had conducted several patient sleep studies using actigraphs, which Jami considers a “less sophisticated technology.” 

“Traditional actigraphy only measures motor activity. Actigraph devices do not include photoplethysmography technology which provides biometrics of interest like heart rate, HRV, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, and skin temperature that you get with WHOOP,” said Jami. This data will help them unlock physiological clues into SUDs, and potentially offer superior treatment interventions and efficacious methods of relapse prevention. 

“The most important thing WHOOP Gateway enables us to do is to passively collect data from larger populations of patients without the patient having to take any action,” said Jami. “Most of the time, patients in any inpatient facility will have restricted access to technology, so WHOOP Gateway enhances the ability to work with nearly any patient in nearly any field of medicine.”

For instance, home healthcare or eldercare facilities would be excellent candidates for WHOOP Gateway. Other potential use cases include coverage for certain types of government and military facilities where wireless service is limited.

Ramping up Substance Use Disorder Research

Ashley is in the process of onboarding more patients into their study. This has presented its own set of challenges with recruitment for the study, which is voluntary because, without access to their phones, patients do not get to experience the benefits of the insights that would ordinarily be delivered through the WHOOP app. 

Promoting Staff Wellness

In addition to the patients, Ashley staff are also wearing WHOOP as part of its wellness program. They track their physical activity and sleep and are active in the Ashley Addiction Treatment WHOOP community and leaderboard, which is a configurable opt-in leaderboard in the WHOOP App where teammates engage in friendly competition around sleep, strain, and recovery. 

"The idea behind offering WHOOP was to see how we could increase engagement with the staff wellness activities that we have going on here," said Jami. "I've talked to multiple people who have said that the biofeedback from the app is very useful, and their corrective behavior is very surprising – in a good way. We are also looking forward to implementing some wellness challenges for staff.”

Jami also noted that patients observing staff wearing and enjoying their WHOOP strap helps to create patient buy-in to participate in the research study and build a sense of community.

Expanding the Frontier of Addiction Medicine

The ultimate goal of Ashley's research is to identify predictive algorithms for SUDs and recovery. To get there, Ashley is ramping up their study to include hundreds of patients within the inpatient and extended care programs. The secrets they uncover in patients’ biometric markers may unlock the next stage of evidence-based SUD treatment and care.

Combining psychometric and biometric data, Ashley has now launched the second pillar of their one-of-its-kind database. This unique database is at the core of their research program and will help them identify novel targets for treatment and develop predictive models capable of guiding a precision medicine approach to SUD treatment.  

Ashley’s Co-CEO and President, Greg Hobelmann, M.D., M.P.H., says, “Ultimately, we want to make WHOOP available to every patient in our care. In addition to the novel outcome data we are able to collect and use to improve treatment services, we also know that WHOOP is a powerful tool that immediately enables our patients to take an even more active part in their recovery and promote their overall health and wellness long-term. Recovery is a lifestyle, a lifestyle in which physical and mental health play an equally important role! WHOOP will help us promote this lifestyle.”