A look at Verily's opioid addiction rehab clinic in Dayton, Ohio, which was meant to highlight a futuristic approach but went low-tech to treat ~5,200 patients
Christopher Boggs started smoking pot in his teens, moved on to cocaine, and finally settled on opioids, which allowed him to evade … Tweets: @miller7 , @jenn_elias , @mhbergen , and @byjulialove Tweets: Ben Miller / @miller7 : “You can't program your way out of this epidemic. No amount of technology can substitute for human relationships.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... Jennifer Elias / @jenn_elias : This piece is a good example of Google and Verily's approach to healthcare. https://twitter.com/... Mark Bergen / @mhbergen : In 2020, Verily, the Google sister company, opened an opioid addiction clinic in my home state. I went to visit and wrote about it for @BW https://t.co/h5F08o7Fc1 Julia Love / @byjulialove : Verily, Google's sister company, is tackling the opioid crisis. It's bringing high tech chops to bear, but stories from its clinic show the importance of traditional care - and proper funding. Great story via @mhbergen https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Big Tech's opioid response began as a distribution problem: Facebook, Google, and Twitter formed the Tech Together to Fight the Opioid Crisis coalition in 2018, and Google followed by surfacing drug-disposal locations inside Google Maps. The premise throughout was that platforms could contribute at software scale.
The Dayton clinic was Verily's chance to prove a deeper version of that thesis — technology-led addiction treatment itself. Instead, the Bloomberg reporting shows the clinic abandoning the futuristic model for low-tech care across roughly 5,200 patients, while researchers had already flagged that NarxCare-style risk-scoring algorithms may be worsening the crisis they were built to curb. Ben Miller's framing in the piece — no amount of technology substitutes for human relationships — is the through-line.
First-order effects
- Verily's own flagship showcase has conceded that its high-tech treatment model failed in practice, leaving the Dayton clinic running on conventional clinical care for its ~5,200 patients.
- The reporters behind the piece (Bergen, Elias, Love) are positioning the story as a verdict on Google and Verily's broader healthcare approach, not just one clinic.
Second-order effects
- Google's lighter-touch opioid efforts — the Maps disposal feature and the cross-platform coalition — now sit under a credibility shadow: if the most ambitious tech intervention reverted to low-tech, the software-only contributions look thinner by comparison.
- Vendors of algorithmic risk-scoring like NarxCare face a harder sell to policymakers and health systems already warned that such tools may be aggravating misuse, tilting procurement toward funded human staffing over software licenses.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Big Tech health ventures converge on a structural limit: addiction and chronic care are labor-intensive in ways that resist platform economics, pushing companies like Verily toward either hiring clinicians at scale or exiting direct care.
- The contrast with telehealth operators that scaled fast without adequate oversight — as in the Done Global 'pill mill' case — suggests regulators will increasingly distinguish between tech-enabled care delivery and tech-substituted care, with funding following the former.
The trend: Big Tech's health-for-good initiatives are being forced from software-first interventions toward clinician-delivered care as algorithmic approaches draw mounting evidence-based scrutiny.