HealthCall Adds New Tool for Addiction Recovery

CROWN POINT, IN, - The Multidimensional Inventory of Recovery Capital (MIRC) is a new tool for assessing what resources a patient has to aid them in recovering from alcohol and drug addiction. The project to develop the MIRC was funded in 2020 by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and Elizabeth Bowen, PhD, was the principal investigator on the team.

HealthCall, LLC recently added a new, automated MIRC assessment within the HealthCall Care Delivery Platform, and interviewed Bowen about the MIRC and its development.

The MIRC is a set of 28 questions, divided into four sections of 7, which produces a standardized score representing the resources an individual has to aid them in recovery. The four sections are based on the concept of Recovery Capital: physical capital, human capital, social capital, and cultural capital.

"Recovery Capital is a way of helping people look holistically at what resources they have," said Bowen. "We were drawing from the original research and theory around recovery capital [...] that was developed more than 20 years ago."

During the interview, Bowen summarized the four categories of recovery capital. She described physical capital as including "a person's income, having stable housing, having transportation." Human capital includes "attitudes, spirituality, and different kinds of knowledge or information." Social capital includes "friendships, family members, acquaintances," and cultural capital includes "Do they have good access to resources in their neighborhood? [...] Do they live in a community where there are fun things to do that don't involve drugs or alcohol?"

To develop the MIRC, Bowen's team consulted existing tools and studies, then created their own original questions. They refined those questions through multiple rounds of feedback and testing, which included reaching out to people with real-life experience recovering from addiction. "We might have good questions from a research perspective," said Bowen, "but that doesn't mean anything if the questions don't make sense and don't feel relevant to the population we're trying to reach."

The team also ensured that the groups they sought feedback from were diverse in terms of race, gender, income level, and recovery pathway. "We wanted this tool to be relevant for anybody," said Bowen. "We really tried [...] to write the items in a way that would be as neutral as possible."

HealthCall has added the MIRC to its directory of standardized and validated SMART Chart assessments. “We refer to these as ‘SMART’ in part because they are augmented with automated scoring, decision support tools, and predictive modeling when appropriate. These innovations help save time, reduce errors, and quickly reveal trends and anomalies making assessment tools usable in mobile integrated health,” said Daniel Hayes, HealthCall president and CEO. “Now, first responders and multidisciplinary teams can assess recovery capital in the field to help people and connect them with the resources most appropriate to their needs.”

The MIRC assessment is available now for HealthCall clients at no additional cost. Listen to the interview here: (https://www.healthcall.com/RecoveryCapital)