Scaling Workit Health's virtual addiction care without breaking systems

Traditional rehab models can be expensive and out of reach for many people who need help. Workit Health set out to change that with virtual, evidence-based addiction care that meets people where they are.

With 10,000+ members, 80+ providers, and operations across nine states, Workit Health has grown into a leading provider of virtual addiction care. Their approach combines telehealth, medication-assisted treatment (MAT), behavioral therapy, and a digital support community to help people recover on their own terms. But as Workit grew, its backend operations struggled to keep up.

Challenge

Workit scaled, but its internal systems didn’t. The care was great; the workflows were not.

“If we scale, everything's going to start to break,” said Steve Geiger, SVP of Product. “We have 101% problems—1% onboarding, 1% credentialing, 1% follow-up. Stack them up, and at 100,000 members, Slack turns into a nightmare, and everyone cries opening their laptop.”

The core problems:

1. 50,000+ chat messages a month, covering everything from med refills to crises with no way to track, categorize, or prioritize them. 

2. Shared Medical Appointments allowed a clinician and a behavioral specialist to see multiple patients at once, improving efficiency but adding scheduling, documentation, and automation challenges.

3. Engineering was stuck managing business processes instead of building new features, forcing constant trade-offs between fixing bottlenecks and innovation.

4. Regulatory complexity by state (Ohio allows randomized drug testing, but Michigan requires scheduling). Constantly updating these policies was a nightmare.

5. Workit’s EHR, RCM, and patient tools didn’t sync, piling admin work onto already-busy clinicians.

Workit needed a scalable solution that wouldn’t overwhelm their team—and, ideally, one that didn’t require an army of developers to maintain.

Solution & Impact

Awell allowed Workit to externalize rule management, allowing more flexibility in creating care flows that were more easily adaptable.

• Automate patient interactions – Pre-appointment check-ins, post-appointment follow-ups, and compliance tracking now flow directly into Elation.

• Improve member engagement & compliance – Patients need to engage monthly for Workit to bill insurance, but engagement isn’t just about visits. Now, Workit tracks non-live interactions (like drug testing and care coordination) to ensure patients stay active in treatment—and billing stays consistent.

• Regulatory agility – state-specific rules were pulled out of code and externalized into Awell allowing care teams, not engineers, to modify care flows and ensure compliance

And most importantly, it helped Workit Health scale without making providers or staff miserable.

“Awell lets us move fast without breaking everything,” Steve said. “It’s not magic, it’s not ‘no-code,’ but it gives us control over the small, annoying problems that add up—so we can focus on the big ones.”