Pear Therapeutics' reSET-O, a prescription app for treating opioid use disorder, may lower patients’ health care costs, compared with patients who don’t use the app, according to a study published in the journal Hospital Practice.

“Engagement and continued treatment with reSET-O in patients with OUD treated with buprenorphine is associated with substantial real-world reductions in medical costs in the 6-month period following the initiation of the reSET-O prescription,” wrote the study’s authors.

The study was funded by Pear, and its authors are employed by or paid to consult for the company.

TOP-LINE DATA

Researchers found patients who used reSET-O along with buprenorphine and counseling lowered their health care costs by $2,385 per person in the six months after they started using the app, compared with the six months before. Patients who only accessed buprenorphine and counseling saw a $353.80 rise in costs the six months after they began treatment.

The cost of the prescription therapeutic was $1,665 for each user, leaving a cost savings of $720 per patient.

HOW IT WAS DONE

The study analyzed real-world healthcare-resource utilization and associated costs from 351 people who were prescribed the reSET-O app between October 2018 and October 2019. The 321 patients who used a single 84-day course saw cost reductions, while the 30 users who weren’t engaged with the app after week one experienced an increase in costs in the six months after treatment began.

reSET-O, the first prescription digital therapy authorized by the Food and Drug Administration to treat opioid-use disorder, uses a series of 67 on-demand audio, text and video "therapy lessons" that are designed to keep patients engaged in outpatient treatment.

THE LARGER TREND

Drug overdose deaths soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the National Center for Health Statistics predicting more than 93,000 deaths in 2020. That represents a large jump from the year before. In 2019, the NCHS predicted just over 72,000 deaths. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributes many of those drug overdose deaths to opioids. In 2019, opioids were involved in about 71% of deaths.

Meanwhile, the pandemic made it harder for some to access healthcare as patients avoided in-person visits and shifted to telehealth, a platform that some patients could find harder to use.

“Prescribed by physicians, reSET-O can safely expand use of the behavioral component of treatment by giving patients 24/7 access to therapeutic content,” Dr. Yuri Maricich, Pear’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.

“This may help address the issues of limited access to clinicians, either because of geographical variations, lack of viable appointment time slots for individual patients, or as a result of restrictions on face-to-face interactions due to the COVID-19 pandemic."

In another study funded by the company and published in the Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research, the authors found reSET-O contributed to a net cost reduction of $2,150 per patient. Pear’s other digital therapeutic products have had mixed success in studies. 

Pear’s app for chronic insomnia, Somryst, has been shown to decrease the amount of time it took users to fall asleep, reduced the amount of time they spent awake at night and reduced insomnia severity.

But a Novartis clinical trial for Pear’s app to treat schizophrenia found no difference between patients who used the app or a placebo, which the company’s CEO chalked up to “methodological issues” with the study.

"I’d like to end by conveying what is a cautious optimism around digital therapeutics for schizophrenia," Pear CEO Corey McCann told MobiHealthNews in January. "As you probably know, this has been an incredibly difficult population for conventional therapeutics.

"There’s a whole history of clinical trial failures in the drug world, and I think we’ve seen the beginning of some very interesting efficacy signals with digital therapeutics for this patient population, and we’ll continue to push that forward."

Pear recently went public via a $1.6 billion special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger with Thimble Point Acquisition Corp. At the time of the announcement, the company said it would use the new funds in its efforts to grow its commercialization efforts for its FDA-cleared products and help it continue to research new products.