Rimrock Personal Concierge: A Whole Person Approach to Addiction Treatment

Rimrock is the largest treatment center in the Billings, Montana region, providing rehab services for adults with substance use and co-occurring disorders. Rimrock views addiction as a whole person illness, affecting an individual’s emotional, physical, spiritual, and social well-being. GoMo Health worked collaboratively with Rimrock to implement personalized engagement solutions for justice-involved clients (currently enrolled in the Rimrock True North and Silverleaf programs) and their support networks.

The Silverleaf program is an outpatient program that supports minor offenders with the objective to keep them off mood-altering substances. The True North program supports formerly incarcerated men and women going through intensive treatment programs.

Goals

1. Reduce criminal justice involvement
2. Increase program completion rates
3. Improve long-term sobriety by providing support following program completion
4. Encourage support person participation in treatment and recovery

Outpatient Support Delivered by Care Messages and the Care Companion

Once enrolled, program participants will receive a regular cadence of Care Messages™, standard text messages to motivate and inspire program participants along their treatment journey. Message tracks are customized by several characteristics of the client or support person, including whether they are a parent, their Native American background, and their type of treatment court.

Clients can also enroll a loved one or support person into the program for additional resources. Once enrolled, they receive two messages per week that provide information on how they can support the client. Additionally, they receive surveys that allow them to indicate if they feel the client needs other assistance.

Some Care Messages also direct program participants to the Care Companion™ for more information. The Care Companion is a cloud-based learning management system that provides personalized, educational content to promote independent education and engagement. Pages within the Companion are broken into sections that parallel the Care Messaging tracks. Content tracks include:

• Behavior change
• Coping skills
• Thinking errors
• Shame resiliency
• Self-care
• Peer videos
• TED Talks
• Mindfulness/meditation
• Phase transition
• Handling independence
• Preparing for court
• Local available resources

Support person tracks also include:

• Family involvement
• How do I figure out if the things I say are helping or harming?
• What is support and what is enabling?

Participant-Initiated Messaging Offer In-Demand Support

In addition to the Care Messages, participants can reach out for help when they need it. All participants can text in any of the following keywords at any time to receive support in their moment of need:

• COPE – Suggested coping strategies and content related to thinking errors
• PEER – Receive a story from other people who have shared similar experiences to the participant
• SMILE – Prompts a joke or uplifting content
• SUPPORT – Prompts a resource guide
• TALK – Requests help from Rimrock peer support specialists

How Are You Doing? and Quality of Life Surveys Facilitate Escalations

On a regular basis, program participants are prompted to take the How Are You Doing? survey, indicating their level of struggle on a scale of 1-5. Additionally, a Quality of Life survey is deployed every three months to determine each participant’s outlook on life, ability to manage their everyday life, and how they are doing.

Based on the participant feedback submitted through the How Are You Doing? survey or the Quality of Life survey, escalations may be triggered to notify the Rimrock care management team. This allows Rimrock to intervene at the right time to provide the support needed at that moment. Rimrock peer support specialists utilize GoMo Chat to hold direct conversations in real-time with program participants to follow up on escalations. 

BehavioralRx

GoMo Health leveraged its proprietary emerging science, BehavioralRx®, to build these programs and determine the engagement strategy, approach, and content delivered.

The following behavioral and cognitive techniques were applied:

• Anchoring Technology / Cognitively connecting the desired action with an existing everyday activity.
• Conditioning Technology / Reinforcing target behavior.
• Influence Technology / Persuasion through shared decision making.
• Nurturing Technology / Guided persuasion.
• Reduction Technology / Persuasion through simplification.
• Suggestion Technology / Intervening at the right time.
• Tailoring Technology / Persuasion through customization.