Goldie Health emerges as lifesaving detection platform

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Mariava Phillips
March 6, 2025

Early feedback shows the digital workflow management tool not only helps overdose responders get organized but also boosts patient engagement rates.

Written by Logan Ward

Early feedback following the November 2024 launch of the Goldie Health digital case-management tool suggests the platform is doing far more than helping overdose responders get organized. It’s catching patients slipping through cracks in the system.

Compared to existing emergency medical services (EMS) referrals, Goldie’s algorithm detected 72% more patients that met the criteria to be treated by an overdose response team. Compared to hospital referrals, Goldie detected 300% more patients.

“We’ve moved beyond being a workflow management tool into a lifesaving detection platform,” says Goldie Health CEO Chris Martin. “If you’re detecting 300% more patients in your county, that’s when we can measure success in lives saved, and that’s what this early data is telling us.”

Martin joined the startup after a successful career as a healthcare and technology entrepreneur. After his own brother died from a drug overdose, Martin began donating his time and money to help people with substance abuse disorder. With Goldie, he saw a chance to make an even greater impact.

“If you engage overdose patients within the first 72 hours — if you say, ‘I can offer you help for free. Are you interested?’ — the vast majority of them are going to say yes,” he says. The trick is to reach them during that “golden window” of time.

Post Overdose Response Teams

To connect with overdose patients when it counts, many counties in North Carolina and across the U.S. have launched Post Overdose Response Teams, or PORTs. These teams connect those who overdose with prevention tools, such as naloxone, warm handoffs to social services, and evidence-based treatment and recovery services. But the new PORTs lacked a digital tool for efficiently and effectively managing their work.

Goldie Health was created to fix that. The Goldie concept was one of several ideas pitched when the Eshelman Innovation Venture Studio partnered with High Alpha Innovation and the Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC) to develop digital solutions to combat the opioid crisis. The effort was funded by a grant from the NC Collaboratory at UNC-Chapel Hill utilizing appropriations received from the North Carolina General Assembly Opioid Abatement Fund. Eshelman Innovation is part of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, the country’s number one pharmacy school.

After Goldie was selected to move forward as a startup, a management team, led by Martin and Chief Operating Officer Matthew Hanis, worked with Amazon Web Services to develop the digital platform. The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Foundation provided $600,000 in seed funding. And in November, Goldie launched its pilot program in Eastern North Carolina’s Carteret County.

Goldie’s digital platform, similar to an app on smart phones, tablets and computers, makes it easy to track patients and encounters, capture signed consent forms, coordinate with social service organizations to help with social determinants of health needs, apply clinical protocols and much more. Built-in reporting is designed to demonstrate engagement, overdose reduction and decreased EMS calls.

Connecting in real time

When Dr. Randall Williams became Carteret County’s Consolidated Health and Human Services Director in 2022, drug overdoses were the county’s number one health issue. PORTs were popping up in counties across the state, but the limiting factor, he says, is that they weren’t operating in real time. Law enforcement would respond to an overdose on Friday night, and the local PORT wouldn’t learn about it until Monday or Tuesday.

“The engagement rate was often 5%,” Williams says. “That means only one out of 20 overdoses was actually getting connected to the PORT.”

Williams says Goldie is a catalyst for making Carteret’s PORT work in real time. “You’ve got people in the field at two o’clock in the morning, and they’re trying to capture data so they can get people where they need to be. Goldie is incredibly effective at doing that.”

Goldie, he adds, also allows the Carteret PORT to track data and make improvements. “How many people are on Medicaid? How do we get them on Medicaid? What are the touch points this person’s seeing in the community as far as housing, employment, medical care, therapy? Goldie is letting us do more with what we’re already doing.”

Before Goldie, Carteret PORT Team Manager Brooke Barnhill and her staff of five peer-support specialists manually managed their work with pen and paper and a spreadsheet. And it’s a lot of work: In 2024, the program served 243 clients, distributed 762 naloxone kits and facilitated treatment entry for 151 individuals.

“We were going into a spreadsheet every time, having to input demographic information over and over again,” Barnhill says. Being able to pull up Goldie on their smart phones and tablet computers saves each staff member an average of two hours a day. “The team feels less stressed out and gets to spend more time with clients.”

Not only that, but with Goldie they can more easily track which interventions are helpful and what the impact is in the community. “Being able to show our peer-support specialists the outcome and impact of their work is great for team morale,” Barnhill says. “Feeling like we’re making a difference is really important in this line of work.”

In the year Carteret County implemented its PORT and adopted Goldie, overdoses plummeted by 87% and drug-related deaths by 46%.

“[Former UNC-Chapel Hill President] Frank Porter Graham once said that the state university comes from the people and should go out to the people,” says Williams. “I did all my training at Chapel Hill. Goldie is a great example of the university and those associated with the university meeting the needs of the people of North Carolina in a very practical way.”

While Carteret was the first county to benefit from Goldie, others have signed on to become Goldie users, including Alexander, Caldwell and Surry counties in North Carolina, and Maryland’s Frederick County. The City of Baltimore has signed a three-year letter of intent. Others are showing interest, says Martin, who is working around the clock to scale-up Goldie Health.

“This is the most important thing that I have tackled in my entire life,” he says. “It’s hard to force myself to get sleep at times.”