Five years ago, I started Commonly Well because I believed that the addiction and mental health recovery experience could be measured in ways that actually matter, not just through clinical markers, but the full picture of someone's recovery capital, wellbeing, and overall life satisfaction.
Building a currency of evidence requires infrastructure most recovery organizations don't have. Here's how we changed that.
The problem wasn't the measurement. We had the Recovery Capital Index. We had thousands of assessments showing people what was working.
The problem was the plumbing.
Every insight required manual data pulls. Every report was a one-off deliverable. We were spending more time wrestling with spreadsheets than helping programs and people improve. We had evidence, but we couldn't turn it into real, actionable insight.
That's when we partnered with Data Culture.
With them, we built what every recovery organization needs but few have or will ever be able to have: a HIPAA-compliant data warehouse that transforms person-reported insights into a scalable intelligence layer. Snowflake and Sigma replaced our makeshift database and spreadsheets. Automated workflows replaced manual reporting. Thirty-minute turnarounds replaced hours of data wrangling.
But the real transformation wasn't technical — it was strategic.
With credible infrastructure, we stopped just reporting what happened and started shaping what happens next. When Palm Beach County had $120 million in opioid settlement funds to allocate for recovery services, our data platform revealed patterns that challenged traditional funding approaches. The result? Investment shifted toward social determinants of health: housing, employment, community support; the exact factors our recovery capital data showed mattered most.
Today, we're no longer just a technology company. We're building the currency of evidence that recovery organizations need to prove their impact, secure funding, and change lives.
The lesson for our field: Infrastructure isn't overhead. It's credibility. It's the difference between having data and having influence. It's what allows small nonprofits to access enterprise-grade analytics and what allows evidence to flow from program evaluation to funding to policy decisions.
If your organization is sitting on years of assessment data but struggling to turn it into actionable intelligence; if you're still pulling reports manually instead of pushing insights automatically; you're not alone. Most recovery programs are exactly where we were three years ago.
But there's a path forward. And it starts with asking: What if our data could do more than describe our impact? What if it could become the currency that proves it?
That's the work we're doing now. And I'm grateful to the team at Data Culture for helping us build the foundation that makes it possible.
How is your organization thinking about measurement that matters? What would change if your evidence could speak with the same credibility as your clinical outcomes?
Work With Us
Commonly Well partners with behavioral health providers, community organizations, and health systems to conduct rigorous, actionable research that drives real outcomes.
Interested in similar strategy, analysis, and support for your organization?
Recovery Capital Index implementation and analysis
Community health surveys and population assessments
Program evaluation and outcomes measurement
Data dashboards for quality, performance, and equity monitoring
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