App offers new weapon in battle with addiction
Liz Read, ‘01 finance, hopes her Birmingham startup, born from needs in her own family, makes a difference in many lives. In the summer of 2019, someone she loved deeply was battling drug addiction.
She didn’t know what to do.
“It doesn’t come with a manual,” she said.
Read went to her phone and looked for an app that would help monitor drug tests.
No such app existed.
That was spring of 2020, when COVID hit. The business Read and her mother ran making handmade luxury jewelry was hit hard, but is recovering, she said.
“My life was upside-down,” Read said.
Post-treatment, mandatory drug testing for people in recovery is problematic. It can be cost-prohibitive. It’s all but impossible for people trying to go back to work to have to drop everything and fly to a designated lab in time to beat the deadline for a mandatory random drug test.
Testing at home can turn confrontational. A missed or failed test can be highly punitive, Read said, but accountability is out of balance. Post-treatment care from family and professionals is needed, said Read, and drug addiction should be treated as a disease.
Read saw the need for a new business.
“I didn’t know anything about startups,” she said. She wasn’t your typical entrepreneur pitching a new app: “I was a non-tech, solo, female founder in the South. But I saw a population in desperate need.”
She talked to everybody who would sit down with her, she said. She learned as she went. She often said, “I’m looking for a way forward that doesn’t exist.”
“In the darkness that was COVID, there was a ray of sunshine,” she said.
Remote COVID testing, using saliva samples, was becoming commonplace.
“Why not do saliva drug testing for somebody who wants to become empowered in their recovery?” Read said.
The turning point came in December 2020 when she entered Alabama Launchpad, a pitch competition sponsored by the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama.
She won $50,000 seed money. The timing was perfect, she said.
“I promised God if I won, I’d pursue it,” she said. Within a few months, she had funding. She found a strategic lab partner supplying saliva tests and began building software for remote testing.
Identity is proved with facial recognition software and, with AI assistance, from anywhere, anytime, results are broadcast within 20 minutes to treatment centers, the client, their support network and other designees.
The company launches in fall 2022. The link for more information is clearmindnow.com.
