EO’s app-powered patient/clinician partnerships and integrated care & product plans are changing the medical and wellness cannabis conversation.
When Emma’s father was diagnosed with cancer, the family turned to something that’s been helping families through cancer diagnoses for ages: Cannabis. But, like millions of others suffering from chronic pain, cancer, depression, anxiety, and a slew of other conditions, they were flying relatively blind, having to rely on community wisdom without input from medical professionals.
“With no doctors, oncologists, or evidence-based online platforms available (or willing) to guide us as Dad began his journey with cannabis medicine, we had no choice but to cobble our approach based on the practical data and insights we could forage,” she notes. Their results varied wildly: Sometimes her father felt at ease, with reduced pain and sleeplessness. When their calculations were off, he could become anxious or incoherent. Professional, evidence-based guidance, she says, would have made a world of difference.
The guess-and-check system of cannabis care is promisingly on track to become a thing of the past. The EO Care app, now in early access phases, provides personalized, medically grounded guidance within a thirty-day care plan to efficiently and accurately optimize your cannabis experience, particularly for those looking for relief. It’s a medical and wellness cannabis partner that you can access wherever you are, with real, human professionals guiding you along the way.
EO Care co-founders Dr. Ben Caplan and Jill Minkin have seen the challenges in finding reliable care, as a doctor and as a patient, firsthand. So along with technology startup pro Sean Collins and digital innovator Dave Batista, they started developing the solution.
“We’re following one person and helping them boost what is successful and reduce what’s not successful so that they get to be better,” says Dr. Caplan, a board-certified family physician and respected cannabis clinician, educator, and advocate. “It’s a pretty simple concept, but hard to do on a massive scale—which is why data is at the heart of what we do.”
Technology for human connection
Some app-based tools provide great resources in locating cannabis available for purchase near you, but most are built best for the recreational consumer, and those in need of more consistent and regimented cannabis-based care are often missing the real, personalized medical guidance needed for the most effective care. Some apps are simply self-directed diary tools or follow a one-size-fits-all, non-data-driven crowdsourcing and review format for care guidance.
Part of serving each individual patient is serving them where they’re at, whether or not they have a medical card.
“They’re painting with a broad-brush, using diagnoses as colors and it just doesn’t work—it’s not actually possible,” explains Dr. Caplan. “What EO is doing is taking one person and applying an extremely refined data model built over three years aggregating what is known about cannabis from the literature, from over 15,000 clinical-patient interactions, from what we’re already aware of, then putting that into a scalable platform combining both technology and human guidance to change the face of cannabis care, one person at a time.”
“Over time, we develop a picture both with individual people and of what happens on a population basis,” he adds. “We can start to develop trends that are useful for a current patient, future patients, and for us as learners and professionals to understand what’s happening with cannabis.”
Part of serving each individual patient is serving them where they’re at, whether or not they have a medical card.
“While our platform is intended to provide this very high-level guidance that is data-driven, it’s important for us to meet our users where they are,” says Minkin. “So our platform is agnostic. It does not require a medical card. However, if you do have one, we can certainly go down that path with specific medical product recommendations.”
Beyond budtenders
The best budtenders can give phenomenal advice on finding cannabis strains that can do the trick—but they’re not medical professionals, and most dispensaries don’t feel like heading to the doctor.
“We’re getting a lot of traction with retailers because, you know, they realize their budtenders aren’t clinicians, and they know it’s crazy for them to pretend that they are,” says Batista. “They’re looking for something like EO as a solution to better serve customers.”
If your favorite budtender has given you reliable advice, that’s great—make sure to tip them super well. But then you can plug their recommendations into EO Care, note how it’s working, and get guidance on what to look for next, even if a different person’s behind the counter on your next dispensary visit.
Serving the canna-curious and the canna-nervous
A lot of us love dispensaries, and they have a deep history among medical cannabis communities. But it’s an environment that can be challenging for some patients, especially if they’re new to cannabis or haven’t consumed it in a while. As a result, some are missing out on life-changing care.
Plus, products change and shift, and with new products always pouring into the market, the best care requires both initial and ongoing guidance since both the person and the products are always changing.
Using EO in tandem with dispensary visits can add another layer of professionalism and guidance to the mix and help empower those who have been hesitant to walk into the shop.
“It feels like [some medical patients] are going into an environment that’s really made for the rec user by and large, and it can be off-putting for them,” notes Caplan.
Using EO in tandem with dispensary visits can add another layer of professionalism and guidance to the mix and help empower those who have been hesitant to walk into the shop. EO’s data model and care team give each person a detailed and specific list of products as one part of the care plan, and EO is testing the inclusion of products as part of a single offering.
Bridging the telemedicine gap
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine is on the rise—but that typically doesn’t include cannabis care. And with online ordering more popular than ever, many patients don’t even have anyone behind a counter to help them.
“Right now, there’s a shopping cart and there’s a kind of AI chatbot, which doesn’t tell you anything about what you’re buying or why,” says Dr. Caplan. “There needs to be a telemedicine version.”
Because customized, personalized guidance is at the core of how EO Care operates, it’s the perfect companion to integrated online ordering, whether you’re in the initial 30-day care plan, or later as you continue with and improve your cannabis regimen.
Scaling for the future of cannabis care
By infusing a new and more accessible level of medical professionalism into the cannabis experience, EO is helping translate plant medicine into a widely accepted treatment modality—which is key as cannabis gains wider acceptance.
“We’re anticipating medical legalization on a national scale coming,” says Dr. Caplan. “And as that happens, the business-as-usual infrastructure will be trying to make cannabis fit into a business-as-usual form, some good and some bad. That’s a reality.”
To help patients get the greatest benefit from plant medicine moving forward, this kind of communication will be crucial.
“Insurance companies are going to start looking at whether they can cover cannabis as a medicine,” predicts Dr. Caplan. “We’re already prepared and building that into the system to embrace that. Insurance companies don’t make fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants decisions. They want data. They want to understand what is working, what’s not working, and why. So far there’s only one player in that game, so it’s exciting to be part of that.”
Team up with EO
Good news—you may qualify for early access to personalized care from EO right now depending on where you live. If you don’t live in a location with available early access today, they’ll put you on the waiting list for when it is available in your area. While you’re at it, let your friends and family know that they can turn to cannabis with clinicians in their corner. EO is the first platform of its kind to get approval from Apple’s App Store, which carefully reviews medically oriented apps.
Once you sign up, EO will help you build and maintain a cannabis care routine that’s right for you based on your medical information, cannabis history, and schedule, with compassionate professionals fine-tuning through expert telemedicine, validation, and encouragement.
Find out more about the future of cannabis-based care at eo.care.
