San Francisco-based telemental health company Cerebral Inc. announced the launch of a new opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment program on Tuesday.
Company CEO Kyle Roberton said in a LinkedIn post that the move is meant to remove barriers to care for both mental health and opioid use disorder.
Specifically, Cerebral’s new OUD program will employ medication-assisted treatment (MAT) along with behavioral health therapy, Robertson said.
Cerebral is built around telebehavioral health and remote prescription management. The company employs a wide range of providers that includes what the company calls “licensed prescribers.”
However, it’s not clear how many of these prescribers are already cleared by the federal government to provide the controlled substances used in MAT.
The Food and Drug Administration has cleared buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone for treating OUD. Robertson’s post did not specify which medications Cerebral will offer.
There is also a notable shortage of prescribing providers that hold X-waivers, the certification to participate in MAT, from the federal government. About 102,600, or 5%, of the roughly 1.7 million physicians, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and clinical psychologists in the U.S. are licensed to prescribe these medications.
About 40% of counties in the United States do not have a single X-waiver-licensed health care provider available to prescribe medication to treat opioid use disorder.
New York City-based Ophelia Health has teamed up with the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing to prepare more clinicians to receive an X-waiver while the federal government announced $25 million in grants to address the shortage.
Nonetheless, the need for additional and effective treatment of OUD has never been higher. Overdose deaths in the U.S. have risen to 0ver 105,000 for a 12-month period ending in October, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of the overdose deaths were from opioids.
“The opioid crisis makes our mission at Cerebral all the more important, as mental health and addiction often go hand in hand,” Robertson said.
Cerebral has received both fame and infamy for its swift and massive growth over the last several months.
In December, it announced that it raised a $300 million Series C on a $4.8 billion valuation. Founded in January 2020, the company has grown to have a presence in all 50 states and employs about 2,500 clinicians.
In February, the company announced that it was going to hire 500 more employees by the end of the year.
Cerebral has also landed bad press for its handling of switching employees to contractors and setting performance-based standards to receive benefits just weeks after it secured its $300 million investment, according to Forbes.
More recently, Bloomberg Businessweek reported, based on interviews with previous Cerebral employees and customers, that its focus on prescribing and managing medication may lead its providers to push too many medications.
Cerebral will also be stepping into a space where several startups and virtual-focused companies are making moves and catching the eye of investors — all of which have some kind of focus on managing MAT treatment virtually.
To name a few, Boston-based Bicycle Health landed $27 million at Series A in June 2021. New York City-based Minded Inc. secured $25 million in seed funding to help it expand the geographic reach and impact of its telepsychiatry and medication management platform. Ophelia Health raised $65 million in 2021.
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