Company extends home-based services into aftercare

The return home after a prolonged stay in the controlled environment of an addiction treatment center carries numerous dangers. A Florida-based company that in early 2012 began offering integrated home-based treatment for individuals with substance use disorders has broadened its focus in recent months to include aftercare support for individuals who complete a stay in a conventional treatment center.

Addiction Reach Home has a group of a dozen professionals who will help clients organize the important first days post-treatment. These clinicians often operate in such proximity that they will spend a short stretch of time living in the home with the client and family if necessary.

“Recovery really happens when they get out [of treatment],” says Darlis Mayes, a certified counselor and intervention expert who is one of the professionals serving in this role with Addiction Reach Home. “You don’t know what’s going to come up in recovery from one day to the next; it could have something to do with one’s job, it could be something with physical health.”

The aftercare services use Skype technology to offer ongoing support from a distance as well, up to the level of actual care being delivered through this electronic means. Addiction Reach Home president and CEO Sue Merklin says services are billed by the company on a daily rate, usually paid by the patient unless a treatment center chooses to make the effort an official part of its aftercare support program. “We want to be an alternative for facilities,” Merklin says.

Mayes related an account of a woman in her mid-20s who had been using high doses of Ambien and also drinking alcohol. She had been in residential treatment three times and contacted Merklin in search of a different approach. Services for that client ended up including an in-home detox and some time spent in the home by the woman’s treating professional. Mayes says the client now has moved forward in her recovery and has started her own business.

Merklin’s company began in 2009 as mainly a marketing consultant for treatment centers, but it would move into direct clinical services in an attempt to improve on what it was seeing as a lack of customized treatment in the field.