A Comprehensive Solution to Medication & Substance Dependence

You may have already heard the news that Lucid Lane has raised $4M in seed round funding recently. A group of top-tier investors joined the round, with Battery Ventures leading. It’s rare to find an opportunity that allows you to do what you love — — for me that’s building products and solutions that can make a difference in important areas like our health — — and do it in a way that impacts millions of lives suffering from medication and substance dependency; a significant societal challenge in the US and globally.

For me this is personal. I have seen how debilitating medication dependence can be based on what my wife and our family had to go through. Jonathan Schieber at TechCrunch recently published an article that captures our story that lead to the creation of Lucid Lane.

Lucid Lane™ is rewriting the rules for preventing and reducing medication and substance dependency by blending the power of technology, data-driven medication tapering plans, real-time interventions and human-based mind-body therapy. These methods coalesce to prevent and reduce medication and substance dependency, starting with opioids and benzos.

Why opioids and benzos first? Firstly, the misuse of, and addiction to, opioids and benzodiazepines is a serious national crisis that has significant detrimental impact on mortality and quality of life. Too many individuals and their families suffer as a result. There are 60 million people who are prescribed opioids and benzos annually in the US, and the number of deaths tied to opioid overdoses has more than quadrupled to over 72,000 between 1999 and 2017 . Overdose deaths involving benzodiazepines increased more than seven fold between 1999 and 2015. Secondly, as a society, we cannot afford to neglect it. The economic burden in the US alone is over $80 billion a year; a number that simply isn’t sustainable.

Lucid Lane is now Skyler Health. Skyler Health team believes we need a new, fundamentally different approach to change the dynamic of medication and substance dependency, prevent the rise of this epidemic, and bend the cost curve. Our approach is focused on changing the status quo of the treatment of medication and substance dependency so that we can prevent and stop the epidemic. We’re guided by three simple principles:

1. People need on-going help and support across behavioral health and medication management while tapering from their dependence on opioids, benzos and other habit-forming substances.
2. Doctors, surgeons and healthcare providers are looking for a holistic, data-driven solution that can help build and execute an all-encompassing tapering strategy while providing them with line of sight into their patients’ progress.
3. Payers, which includes healthcare companies, employers and, increasingly, all of us, want to spend less money on this huge societal challenge.

Our plan is to bring together deep healthcare experience with Silicon Valley data-driven consumer focus and cutting-edge technology to prevent and stop long term dependency and addiction. We do this by empowering patients and their physicians. We’ve put together a fantastic team in Palo Alto that are working on building this medication and substance dependency health digital platform.

Using a proprietary clinical protocol and digital health platform, we measure and monitor vital behavioral and emotional health signals and aggregate them into actionable and personalized treatment plans. Those plans are then delivered via licensed therapists in a timely fashion in order to produce significant improvement in a patient’s well-being.