WVXU Stories

Google Affiliated Company Creates Dayton Pilot To Help People Addicted To Opioids

91.7 WVXU | By Ann Thompson

Published June 14, 2019 at 5:00 AM EDT

This is a rendering of what the campus in the Carillon neighborhood will look like. Two of the six buildings are finished.

Dayton, hard hit by the opioid crisis, is battling back. The latest help comes from a Google Alphabet company called Verily, which is piloting an addiction treatment program it may scale nationwide.

Friday is the grand opening of OneFifteen, named for what used to be the number of people who died daily in the U.S. from an opioid addiction, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Verily and its team of partners, including Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc., the Kettering Health Network and Premier Health, are building a tech-enabled campus to promote recovery. Today's ribbon-cutting marks the completion of two of the six spaces that will compose the full campus. Eventually OneFifteen will have recovery housing where patients will stay for a couple of months.

Verily will apply analytics to measure the program's effectiveness.

The company's website says besides treating patients, a team of clinicians, engineers and health systems specialists will "generate insights that could advance the understanding of how to treat and promote sustained recovery for those experiencing addiction and allow for evolving best practices."

"We are thrilled to launch OneFifteen in Dayton, Ohio, to support the recovery of people suffering from opioid use disorder and over time, other substance use disorders," says Marti Taylor, president and chief executive officer of OneFifteen. "Recovery is not a 28-day process and requires a long-term, holistic recovery, including vocational training and sober living."

She says OneFifteen is providing all levels of care on one campus. "We think that is a pretty unique approach where we will have crisis stabilization all the way through to recovery housing on one campus."

"Dayton has been at the epicenter of our national addiction crisis, and we have worked to share what we've learned through that experience with other communities," says Dayton Mayor Nan Whalen in the Verily release. "I am thrilled to welcome OneFifteen to Dayton to join our robust ecosystem of partners tackling opioid addiction.

OneFifteen says the information it learns about treatment will be shared with the Dayton community.