People receiving methadone for opioid use disorder must often visit a clinic every day to ensure the drug isn’t diverted into the illicit market. It’s a hassle that many addiction specialists believe keeps people from the care they need. Now some providers are experimenting with remote monitoring to reduce patients’ burden. Instead of coming into a clinic, they’re allowed to take home a few doses and send a recording to prove they took them as directed. “Sonara, by offering remote observation of take-home methadone, creates this layer of supervision to what was previously unsupervised, and that is able to build trust between the provider and the patient,” said Sheeba Ibidunni, vice president of Sonara Health, one of the companies experimenting with the new protocol. Billionaire Mark Cuban was one of the first investors in the company, which got its first commercial contract in 2022. How it works: Patients can access Sonara through a web-based app that runs on smartphones. By logging in, scanning a QR code and displaying their methadone bottle to show it hasn’t been tampered with, they can record themselves taking their dose, Ibidunni said. Sonara partners with organizations offering free phones to those who don’t have one, she said. After taking their dose, patients must repeat a sentence to ensure they're not hiding methadone in their cheeks. They then send the video to their care team. Sonara is available in 35 methadone treatment centers spread across nine states, with up to 900 patients using it, according to Ibidunni. Dollars and cents: Many states’ Medicaid programs don’t cover the remote-monitoring service, so some treatment providers have used opioid settlement money – stemming from state lawsuits against the makers of prescription opioids – to pay for it, Ibidunni said. She said the firm is lobbying state officials to fund pilot programs, which she said will show that the method saves money by reducing nonemergency medical transportation, which Medicaid covers. The lobbying led New Jersey to appropriate $250,000 in funding for Sonara in fiscal 2025. Ibidunni hopes this will lead the state’s Medicaid program to cover the service in the future. Separately, the National Institute on Drug Abuse is funding a project that’s assessing the results of a remote monitoring system for methadone.
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