NEW: We built Active SOS to solve a simple problem: the moment when you need help and can't talk. One tap. Your people get your location and a message you set up in advance. No fumbling. No explaining. No hoping someone picks up.
We thought the market was families. Parents and teenagers. Hikers and runners. People who wanted a safety net they could actually use in thirty seconds of fear.
And then behavioral health facilities started calling.
Step One: Patients Started Using It First
Before any facility or clinical team showed up, patients did. People in early sobriety. People managing mental health conditions. People in outpatient programs who were nervous about the gap between their Thursday appointment and the following Monday — the stretch of time when the risk is highest and the support is thinnest.
They weren't using Active SOS as a clinical tool. They were using it the same way anyone uses it: to have a faster way to reach their person. A sponsor. A family member. A peer support friend from their group. They set up alerts with names like "I'm struggling — don't call, just come" and "I made it through — checking in." They sent those alerts to the people who had already made a commitment to show up.
What made it work wasn't complexity. It was the opposite. One tap. No talking required. The recipient got a text with the patient's location — no app needed on their end. The whole interaction could happen in five seconds, in a parking lot, in a moment when "I need help" was the only thing the person could produce.
The gap between a Thursday appointment and the following Monday is when relapse risk is highest. Patients needed a way to signal their care circle without having to articulate what was happening — or have the capacity to make a phone call. One tap filled that gap.
Step Two: Facilities Realized They Could See It Too
When behavioral health facilities — outpatient programs, SUD treatment centers, mental health practices — saw what their patients were doing with Active SOS, the immediate question was: can we be on the receiving end of those alerts?
Yes. Because the app was already designed that way. Anyone the patient adds to their alert group receives the SMS. No app required. A care coordinator, a clinical supervisor, a nurse — anyone the patient designates gets the same timestamped alert with GPS location that their sponsor was already receiving.
What facilities discovered next changed the direction of the product entirely.
They were getting data. Timestamped check-ins. GPS-confirmed location at time of alert. Alert type (patient-labeled, using whatever name the patient had set up). Response patterns across their patient population. Which patients were checking in consistently. Which patients had gone dark. Which patients triggered a distress alert at 11pm on a Saturday.
Before Active SOS
Facilities had no visibility between appointments. They found out about a relapse or crisis at the next scheduled visit — or not at all until an emergency room call. Readmission was the first signal something had gone wrong.
After Active SOS
Facilities receive timestamped alerts directly from patients, on their existing phones, with no new hardware or app required. A care coordinator sees "Medication Taken" at 8am every day — and notices when it doesn't come in on Thursday.
The care team wasn't monitoring patients in a surveillance sense. The patients were choosing to include them. It was opt-in, patient-initiated, and built on the same trust structure that had already made the alerts work between patients and their personal support networks.
Step Three: The Reports Changed the Conversation
The more facilities used Active SOS with their patients, the more they wanted the data in a structured, exportable format. Check-in timestamps. Alert types. Response logs. A longitudinal view of patient engagement between visits.
When we started generating those reports, something clicked for the clinical teams reviewing them. The data wasn't just operationally useful — it was starting to look a lot like the documentation required to support Remote Patient Monitoring billing.
RPM billing codes — specifically CPT 99457, 99458, 99490, and related codes — require documented evidence of clinical staff time spent reviewing patient-generated data and communicating with patients between visits. The Active SOS alert logs were exactly that: patient-generated data, timestamped, tied to a care plan, reviewed by clinical staff, with response documentation.
| CPT Code | Description | Est. Monthly Rate | Annual (100 Patients) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99457 | RPM Management — first 20 min clinical staff time | $50–$65/patient | ~$69,000 |
| 99458 | RPM Management — additional 20 min increments | $40–$50/patient | ~$54,000 |
| 99490 | Chronic Care Management (2+ chronic conditions) | $62–$75/patient | ~$80,400 |
| H0038 | Peer Support / Self-Help Services | Varies by payer | Behavioral health / SUD programs |
Rates reflect 2024–2025 national averages. Billing eligibility depends on payer, diagnosis, and documentation. Consult your compliance team. Active SOS provides time-stamped, exportable event data to support your documentation process.
A practice with 100 qualifying patients could be looking at $100,000 or more in annual RPM revenue that was sitting uncaptured — not because the clinical work wasn't happening, but because there was no scalable documentation system to capture it. Active SOS was generating that documentation as a byproduct of the patient check-in process that was already happening.
The billing codes existed. The clinical work existed. The gap was documentation. Active SOS alert logs — timestamped, patient-initiated, tied to a care plan — became that documentation layer. The revenue opportunity was already there. We just made it capturable.
Step Four: Building Connect to Scale the Process
At a certain point, managing RPM workflows across a patient population on top of the consumer alert infrastructure we'd built wasn't going to work at scale. Facilities needed more than alert delivery and exportable logs. They needed a purpose-built clinical portal — a place to manage patients, monitor engagement across a practice, review alert activity, and generate the documentation that supported billing.
That's what we built. The Connect Application.
The Connect Application
A Clinical Portal Built on the Alert Infrastructure That Already Worked
Connect is Active SOS's purpose-built RPM management layer — a React-based web portal (Supabase backend, deployed on Netlify) that gives care teams a complete operational view of their patient population.
- Patient enrollment and alert group management — set up check-in protocols for each patient
- Dashboard view of alert activity across all enrolled patients — who checked in, who didn't, who triggered a distress alert
- Timestamped activity logs exportable for CPT billing documentation
- Alert type customization — care teams configure the alert names and meanings for their clinical context
- SMS delivery to any care team member — no app required for providers
- HIPAA-aware architecture — no covered medical data transmitted by default; BAA available
The patient experience didn't change. They still have the same app, the same one-tap experience, the same alert groups that include their sponsor and their family alongside their clinical team. What changed was the facility's ability to manage that process at scale — across 50 patients or 500, with structured documentation instead of exported spreadsheets.
Connect is what turns a behavioral health or primary care practice into an RPM-capable operation without requiring them to rip out their existing workflow or ask patients to use a system they won't adopt. The patient already has their phone. They already know how to tap a button. Everything built on top of that is built for the practice, not the patient.
Where This Fits in the Healthcare Landscape
The evolution from consumer safety app to RPM platform isn't a pivot. The core product — one tap, GPS alert, SMS delivery — is the same. What changed is who's using it and what they're doing with the data it generates.
For patients in mental health and SUD recovery, Active SOS is still a personal safety tool. The people in their alert group include their sponsor, their family, and their clinical team. It works because it's simple and because it doesn't require the patient to do anything complicated in a moment when complicated things are impossible.
For facilities, Active SOS is an RPM infrastructure layer. It handles patient check-in delivery, alert escalation, activity logging, and documentation — on top of the infrastructure that patients were already using voluntarily. The clinical team gets visibility between appointments. The billing team gets documentation that supports CPT coding. The patient gets a care team that knows when they go dark.
For practices working with KonnectMD — our primary telehealth integration partner — Active SOS fits into a broader care model where the $161/month bundle for the practice and $11/month per member rate creates a complete telehealth-plus-RPM offering. The alert data feeds into the broader care record. The check-in protocol fits the existing appointment cadence.
The use cases it serves are exactly the ones that produce the worst outcomes when the gap between appointments goes unmonitored: SUD recovery in early sobriety, chronic illness management in rural areas where the nearest specialist is 47 miles away, post-discharge monitoring for high-risk patients, and behavioral health care for populations that historically disappear between visits.
What We're Building Toward
The roadmap for Active SOS RPM is focused on making Connect a complete clinical workflow tool — deeper reporting, tighter integration with existing EHR and telehealth platforms, and expanded CPT code support as the behavioral health RPM billing landscape continues to evolve.
The 30-day pilot program exists because we're confident the data will show what we've already seen in practice: patient check-in rates go up when the barrier goes down. Facilities get earlier warning on patients at risk. And the documentation that was always required to support RPM billing starts generating itself as a natural output of the process.
If you're running a behavioral health practice, a DPC practice, an outpatient SUD program, or a rural health operation and the gap between appointments is where your patients are falling through — this is what we built Connect for.
See What RPM Documentation
Looks Like When It Runs Itself.
Active SOS RPM supports CPT codes 99457, 99458, 99490, and more. HIPAA-aware architecture. SMS delivery. No new devices. Start with a 30-day pilot — or book a demo to see the Connect Application in action.
Billing eligibility depends on payer, diagnosis, and documentation · Consult your compliance team · Contact David Zink