Accelerating Family Access to Substance Use Disorder Recovery Programs Through Innovative Financing and Partnership
by Alison Rein, Vice President
Rates of substance use disorder (SUD) and drug overdose deaths in the United States have steadily climbed during the last decade. For mothers and their children, this epidemic has especially damaging implications.
Pregnant women in need of treatment for SUD face significant barriers to accessing care and other resources needed for successful recovery. Societal stigma, fear of losing child custody, and a lack of holistic care options that integrate prenatal care with SUD treatment, deter many women from care when they need it most.
Comprehensive programs with integrated residential and community components that can link prenatal and postnatal care with SUD treatment are highly effective in producing sustained recovery for mothers; they also increase healthy births and enable families to remain together or reunify.
Unfortunately, the demand for these programs far exceeds supply across most geographies in the United States. The few programs that meet these robust criteria are stretched far too thin and cannot fully address community need. Absent access to capital to cover steep upfront expenditures (e.g., building acquisition or refurbishment), and lacking both adequate and predictable revenue from services delivered, many strong community-based service organizations with high-impact recovery solutions feel stuck.
In a new piece authored by Quantified Ventures and our Humana and Volunteers of America (VOA) partners, we outline how access to such programs can be accelerated through innovative financing and partnerships.
While developed to scale and sustain VOA’s Family Focused Recovery (FFR) program, this is a flexible financing and partnership model that can be replicated for other health-related social needs where demand far exceeds supply.
Quantified Ventures is committed to working with partners to collaboratively develop sustainable and replicable health outcomes investment models, and to build the supply of on-the-ground human and social services in our communities.
We’d love to hear how you’re leaning in on investments and financing strategies that focus on building community capacity to deliver improved health outcomes and lower costs. If you have ideas for potential collaborations, please let us know!