Workit Health wants recovery to fit your life

Before Workit Health had a name, it had sticky notes. In an Oakland apartment, Robin McIntosh and Lisa McLaughlin covered the walls with words about the company they wanted to build. Their working title was ENDURE. Fortunately for everyone who would eventually download the app, they reconsidered. Recovery already had enough endurance in it.

The two women were in long-term recovery. They understood treatment from the receiving end, where an appointment can require transport, childcare, explanations at work, and the courage to be seen walking through a particular door. A service can be clinically sound and practically out of reach. That distinction became their business.

The obstacle before the appointment

Workit, founded in 2015, provides virtual outpatient treatment for substance use disorders. Its central proposition is ordinary enough to sound unambitious: people should be able to get help without first reorganizing their lives. Yet the ordinary details are where access is often decided. A missed bus has no diagnostic code. It can still cost someone a visit.

In a founders’ interview, McIntosh described losing friends and loved ones to treatment waitlists and rigid ideologies. That experience pushed the pair toward a service designed around access and medical evidence. They brought design, technology, and clinical perspectives to a problem they had lived through. Personal experience supplied the questions; clinicians would have to supply the care.

“Nothing about us without us.”Lisa McLaughlin, on the patient-led principle behind Workit

Today, the company names Gil Kochman as CEO and M. Justin Coffey as chief medical officer. Its team includes prescribers, behavioral health clinicians, recovery coaches, and care navigators. The app is the meeting place for those people. A patient is buying healthcare delivered through software, with clinical decisions made by licensed professionals.

The waiting room gets smaller

The process starts with intake, insurance verification, and scheduling. A clinician meets the patient by video and may prescribe medication when appropriate. For opioid use disorder, treatment can include buprenorphine/naloxone, commonly known as Suboxone. Alcohol treatment can include naltrexone or acamprosate. Workit also offers care for kratom-related problems. Medication goes to a pharmacy; follow-up stays connected through the app.

Patients can message their care team, join guided recovery groups, and submit home drug screens. Workit says it ships screening kits discreetly and does not punish members for positive results. That policy matters: a test can tell a clinician what needs attention while keeping the patient connected to treatment.

For alcohol care, the stated goal can be drinking less or stopping altogether. Twelve-step participation is not required. Workit’s harm-reduction approach makes room for people who want help before they are ready to adopt a particular recovery identity. The customer might be a parent, a worker, or someone living far from a specialist. Their shared need is usable outpatient care.

The bill has two addresses

Workit earns revenue through insurance reimbursement and direct self-pay fees. Its institutional relationships include health plans and provider organizations that refer patients. The company advertises typical insured out-of-pocket costs of $25-$35 monthly, but deductibles, coinsurance, and individual coverage can change the bill. Medication is charged separately through the pharmacy.

Without insurance, opioid and kratom care currently costs $90 to start, then $75 weekly. Four weeks total $300; five total $375. Alcohol care costs $250 for the first month and $150 thereafter. Those numbers buy the program, not an unlimited promise about every expense surrounding treatment. Weekly billing deserves to be read as weekly billing.

Insurance relationships also shape distribution. A clinician referral or an in-network benefit can bring patients into care who would never browse a wellness marketplace. Workit’s business depends on making the service acceptable to payers and workable for patients. Neither an attractive interface nor a signed insurance contract can accomplish both alone.

Count the people who stay

In October 2021, Workit announced a $118 million Series C led by Insight Partners, with CVS Health Ventures and other investors participating. It reported a 400% membership increase over the preceding 18 months. The proposed use of the money included geographic expansion and more primary and psychiatric care. Growth created an opportunity to test the model beyond its earliest adopters.

Workit now reports having supported more than 35,000 people cumulatively. That is different from current enrollment. Its research arm, Workit Labs, studies questions including rural access, pregnancy, and hepatitis C co-treatment. These are useful choices because the convenience of telehealth has to survive the circumstances of actual patients.

The company advertises 54% retention at six months. Staying in treatment is a useful measure of access over time, though a retention percentage cannot tell us whether every patient improved. Comparisons with other programs also depend on who enrolled, how follow-up was counted, and what kinds of care were being compared.

The last mile still has a counter

A 2025 study involving Workit patients makes that point sharply. Among 601 respondents, 27.5% reported trouble filling buprenorphine prescriptions in the previous year. Insufficient pharmacy stock was the most common reported problem among those experiencing difficulties. The survey captures respondents’ experiences at one practice; it cannot establish how every telehealth patient fares.

Geography can change, too. Workit returned to California in November 2025 after an earlier withdrawal. Its announcement attributed the retreat to post-pandemic regulatory uncertainty and the return to greater stability and experience. That is the company’s explanation, rather than an independent account of the decision. For patients, a state opening or closing is a very tangible change in access.

There is another obligation: privacy. Settlement materials describe a $578,680 fund concerning alleged sharing through third-party technologies. Workit denies wrongdoing and denies that personal or health information was disclosed; the settlement is not an admission. A company inviting people to discuss addiction online has to earn trust in its data handling as well as its clinicians.

Bicycle Health offers another virtual opioid-treatment option. Local practices and hospital programs provide other routes, with different capabilities. Workit’s combination of flexible goals, medication, and support is useful when outpatient care fits the patient. It depends on supported geography, connectivity, and access to medicine; it cannot provide a hospital’s monitoring.

The lesson another service can borrow is concrete: examine every handoff after someone asks for help. Verify coverage, shorten scheduling, keep communication open, and treat setbacks as information. Workit’s promise becomes meaningful when the next step remains possible. A recovery program earns its place in a person’s life one completed step at a time.