The more Dr. Brian Bunnell spoke with therapists, the more he kept finding a common thread: they wanted their patients to be able to practice the skills they learned in therapy. But there were some barriers to the seemingly simple request.
"Clients more often than not forget not only what to do, but when to do it and why," Bunnell said. "So we worked with therapists and clients asking, 'What would be the best way to overcome that?' and pretty much everyone we interviewed said, 'If you just sent texts to remind them, that would be so much easier.'"
Bunnell, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida Department of Psychiatry, teamed up with Brandon Welch and Dylan Turner, the co-founders of telehealth platform Doxy.me. Thanks to a grant from the Florida High Tech Corridor, the trio founded Adhere.ly in late 2019.
"The fact is researchers like us often develop health IT solutions to test them, but then they conduct the research and no one can ever find them on the market," he said. "And that's usually because they built it to study it and then the grant money runs out. One of our main motivations is it is something people want to use, because the impact is much greater than just ending it when the grant runs out."
The free platform provides different digital therapeutic practices for patients to use, and provides a way for therapists to remind the patients to do those exercises through both texts and email.
"It's hard to adapt those skills one hour a week, so additional time is needed to develop and refine the skills and then adapt them to the real world," Bunnell said, adding twice as many patients see improvement when they practice the skills at home. "It's not different than math or reading. You have to go home and practice it."
The company currently has roughly 100 monthly users that joined with no marketing effort from the company, according to Bunnell. He is hopeful Adhere.ly's platform can integrate with Doxy.me's platform to further bolster both companies.
"The goal is to integrate the Adhere.ly interface into a telemedicine platform, so providers can more seamlessly use the platform during their telemental health therapy session," he said. "Assigning and assessing homework can be extra difficult with telemedicine because there are confidentiality concerns and it also takes computer skills. It's quite difficult, so we're planning on integrating the platform."
The company has five employees with another three on the way. It relies on federal funding currently, but Bunnell said it was not opposed to more traditional methods of funding in the future. They are also working on expanding their offerings to include more adult-centric therapeutic exercises and plan to launch a clinical trial.
