Former Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy Joins WeRecover to Spearhead Innovation Around Access to Mental Health Care

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Oct. 17, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, addiction treatment search engine WeRecover announced the addition of former Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy to their Board of Advisors. Kennedy is a renowned mental health advocate who served as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Rhode Island from 1995 to 2011. He served alongside Governor Chris Christie, another WeRecover advisor, on the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. Together, they will be working to broaden WeRecover's reach via public, payer, and health system partnerships.

On joining WeRecover, Kennedy said, "While in Congress, I co-sponsored the landmark Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. Since leaving, I've worked hard to advance the practices, policies, and partnerships needed to broaden access to mental health and addiction care for all. In WeRecover, I found a company whose mission is completely aligned with my own. They are building digital bridges to mental health and addiction treatment services?bridges that have never existed until now. Filling this critical role helps people connect with the care when and where they need it. It's a major step forward in addressing our nation's addiction crisis and finally making mental health essential health."

WeRecover's CEO Stephen Estes expounded, "WeRecover has created the simplest way possible for anybody battling addiction to understand the spectrum of options available to them. We've databased America's treatment programs, built software that enables them to participate in our platform, and created a patient-facing user experience that takes a weeks-long process and distills it down to a few minutes."

Max Jaffe, co-founder and COO said, "Our task now is to get our platform into the hands of as many prospective patients as possible, and the simplest way to do that is through public-private partnerships, health systems, employers, and payers. Patrick Kennedy brings unparalleled experience navigating America's mental health care system and we look forward to collaborating with him to stem the tide of this epidemic."

While Kennedy has helped shape the laws that govern access to mental health care on the federal and state level, WeRecover is working to streamline access to care through private sector innovation around:

• Time to treatment: WeRecover automates instant, individualized matches with treatment centers.
• Transparency, simplicity, and choice: people can see the options available to them given their insurance, budget, clinical needs, gender, and geography.
• Quality of Care: WeRecover is collecting data around patient outcomes to inform the relevance of their search results for each individual seeking treatment.
• Making informed decisions: WeRecover's algorithm uses digital, clinically-rooted frameworks that inform users' search results based on their self-assessed clinical needs.

About WeRecover: Founded in 2016, WeRecover is a venture-backed technology company that has built the nation's most accurate database of treatment programs and a matching algorithm that shows people their individualized treatment options. Since launch, WeRecover's platform has facilitated over thirty million matches with treatment centers. They have raised $5.3m from a number of venture capital firms including Crosslink Capital, Wonder Ventures, Struck Capital and Box Group.

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SOURCE WeRecover