Nobody understands the unique health needs and disparities of communities better than local health providers. In our experience, we find patients do far better when we collaborate with well-established community affiliates, than they do within traditional "stand-alone" clinics. 

By adding our program to these other local services, trueNorth can offer a very convenient "one-stop shopping" model of integrated care. Many of the conditions trueNorth treats are quite complex. Due to this complexity, our patients need to put a great deal of time and energy into recovering their health and wellness. If we can help make care more convenient and "hassle-free," patients can thrive.

trueNorth collaborates with a wide range of local community health care providers including:

There is a growing consensus in the addiction medicine community that the era of the "stand-alone" methadone clinic is drawing to a close. Over the past few years, various alternative models have been proposed, but the one that has been gaining a lot of recent attention in Ontario is the Rapid Access Addiction Medicine (RAAM) style clinics. 

The single biggest thing that distinguishes RAAM clinics from other methadone clinics is the scope of services offered. While RAAM clinics can and do offer methadone and buprenorphine maintenance treatment, they also offer many other addiction-related services.  

trueNorth proudly offers a full spectrum of RAAM services. The physicians recruited for our team have a tremendous knowledge base. In fact, many of the physicians on our team not only complete work for trueNorth but also hold academic positions at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and various other teaching hospitals across Ontario.

As previously mentioned, what sets RAAM clinics apart from stand-alone methadone clinics is the broader scope of services these RAAM clinics offer. The problem with the traditional RAAM model is that there is often no way to find and recruit a team of addiction medicine experts to live and work in each and every community across Ontario.
 
To solve this problem, trueNorth has worked with a variety of telemedicine experts. Now all of our community partners can access trueNorth’s clinical and administrative services via the cloud. This is a huge advantage because trueNorth has physicians and administrative staff members available via the cloud 7 days a week, 365 days a year. In other words, every single one of our sites has access to the knowledge and expertise of our team from any site on any day.
 
We wanted a term that would help to distinguish our cloud-enhanced approach from the more “standard” or “traditional” RAAM clinic approach. The name our team has given to our cloud-enhanced "RAAM-plus" approach is TEEMAP (Telemedicine Enhanced Expanded Medical Access Partnership). We choose the name TEEMAP because it emphasizes that our telemedicine model is based on community partnerships, and the medical services we offer go well beyond just methadone & buprenorphine (and in fact go beyond just simple addiction medicine).
 
Our TEEMAP model of care has been so successful that trueNorth has been invited internationally to speak on the subject of using cloud-based technology to improve the delivery of addiction medicine care.