Recovery support in America has a structural problem: the system is largely built around the moment of crisis, not the long road that follows. Getting sober, or stabilizing after a mental health episode, is treated as the finish line. For most people, it’s just the beginning.
Third Horizon is dedicated to developing and advancing innovative approaches to increase access, reduce costs, and improve outcomes in behavioral health — working in partnership with organizations that share our mission to build what the field needs next. Few challenges illustrate the gap between what’s possible and what’s accessible as clearly as recovery support. The tools exist. The evidence for peer-based, community-centered care is strong. The question is whether we can build the infrastructure to deliver it consistently, at scale, to the people who need it most.
In the firm’s latest video, Third Horizon President Greg Williams and WEconnect Founder Daniela Tudor sit down with Third Horizon’s Erica Bauer to talk about what that infrastructure actually looks like in practice.
WEconnect is a technology platform built around a deceptively simple insight: sustained recovery requires human connection, accountability, and meaningful incentive. At the heart of the platform are peer recovery support specialists — full-time, state and nationally certified employees with lived experience in recovery — who connect with members daily through group meetings, goal-setting, and habit-building routines. Upon completing those activities, members earn financial incentives instantly redeemable as gift cards through the app.
The approach is grounded in a growing body of evidence that finds that peer-based, relationship-centered support improves treatment retention, reduces relapse rates, and lowers long-term healthcare utilization — including fewer emergency department visits and reduced re-hospitalization. A Texas Health and Human Services long-term study found that, after 12 months, substance use disorder peer specialists produced measurable improvements in housing stability, employment, and wages while driving down health care utilization across the board. A 2025 cost-effectiveness analysis concluded that long-term peer recovery support services (PRSS) are cost-effective from both a health system and societal perspective — and that expansion of PRSS across the U.S. should continue. The health care system is beginning to take notice, and reimbursement is following: Medicare added peer support as a covered service in 2024, and 48 states and Washington D.C. now offer some form of Medicaid reimbursement for PRSS.
WEconnect has become a billing provider, positioning the platform to scale across all three major business lines: Medicare, Medicaid, and ACA marketplace coverage. Third Horizon is collaborating with WEconnect on member engagement with insurance companies — working to connect health plan members with support that extends well beyond the clinical encounter. It’s a model that reflects what the evidence increasingly confirms: that recovery lowers overall healthcare spend, and that investing in high-quality behavioral health access is both the right thing to do and the most economically sound approach to reducing long-term costs.
Third Horizon has been closely engaged with the research underpinning this work. Last year, Third Horizon and Unity Recovery co-published The Value Proposition for Peer Recovery Support Services Delivered through Community-Based Organizations — a comprehensive white paper examining the evidence base for PRSS, the evolving funding and regulatory landscape, and practical pathways for scaling community-based recovery support. Greg Williams, whose perspective anchors this video, was a contributing author.
The behavioral health system has too often treated recovery as a problem to be managed rather than a journey to be supported. WEconnect is building something different — and Third Horizon is proud to be part of it.
Watch the full video to hear Greg, Daniela, and Erica’s perspectives on what it takes to build a recovery platform that actually works, and what it could mean for the future of behavioral health in America.