Dry January, Addiction Care, and the Hidden Cost of Credentialing Delays

Written by Dr. Danielle Kelvas MD

Key Takeaways

• January is a critical window for alcohol use intervention, yet access to care is constrained by severe provider shortages and administrative delays.
• Approximately 30 million people in the U.S. meet the criteria for Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), but only a small fraction ever receive treatment.
• Credentialing delays sideline qualified addiction specialists, sometimes for months, reducing already scarce clinical capacity.
• Faster credentialing and onboarding directly increase patient access to care, especially in time-sensitive conditions like substance use disorders.
• Technology platforms like Credential Network and Appropos Health address different sides of the same bottleneck: getting help to patients when they’re ready to act.
  

Why Dry January Matters More Than We Admit

January is often framed as a lifestyle reset: a chance to “take a break” from alcohol after the holidays. But beneath the wellness headlines, Dry January exposes a much more serious reality.

January and February are among the hardest months for mental health and substance use (12). Cold weather, isolation, respiratory illness, and post-holiday stress all converge. At the same time, many healthcare workers take well-earned time off, worsening staffing shortages that already strain the system (13).

For individuals considering reducing or stopping alcohol use, timing is everything. Motivation is often fragile. When someone finally decides, “I want help now,” delays can mean the difference between engagement and relapse.

Yet for millions of Americans, help isn’t just hard to find: it’s structurally unavailable.

The Scale of the Addiction Care Gap

For Kim Johnson, CEO of Managed Health Connections and founder of Appropos Health, the urgency is personal.

Johnson and his wife have two adopted sons. One was removed from the care of his birth mother because she was using crack cocaine. The child wasn't physically affected, but Johnson saw firsthand what happens when someone struggling with addiction doesn't have the support to hold a family together.

"People going through addictions need more support," Johnson said in a recent interview with Credential Network. "We believe technology can increase the access to support for people with substance use disorders."

That belief drives his work on Appropos Health, a platform designed to meet patients in the moment they're ready to change, not days or weeks later, beginning with reducing alcohol use. 

In our conversation with Kim, he was quick to dive into the numbers: 

• Roughly 30 million people in the U.S. qualify as having Alcohol Use Disorder (11).
• Only about 11% ever receive treatment or even a referral to care (7).
• The U.S. has an estimated 500,000 clinicians licensed to treat addiction across all levels (11).
• Untreated AUD costs approximately $15,000 per person annually, most of which is paid by employer-sponsored health insurance plans (4). 
• Alcoholic liver disease alone (one downstream consequence of untreated alcohol use) carries an estimated $31 billion annual economic burden in the United States (4). 

This math is concerning. 

Even more concerning: patients who do get referred often face delays of several days or longer before they can engage with treatment. In addiction medicine, this “loss to referral” window is deadly to momentum. Motivation fades. Life intervenes. Calls go unanswered. The moment passes.

And this is before accounting for an often-overlooked factor: credentialing delays.

How Credentialing Delays Reduce Real-World Care

Clinician shortages aren’t just about training pipelines. They’re also about logistics.

New addiction specialists may wait weeks or months to be fully credentialed and onboarded at hospitals, clinics, or health systems (1). During that time, they can’t legally see patients. They can’t bill. And they can’t help people who are actively seeking care.

High turnover exacerbates the problem. When a clinician leaves, replacing them isn’t as simple as hiring someone new. The credentialing clock resets, and clinical capacity drops, even though qualified providers exist (9).

In a field with tens of millions of patients in need, every idle provider matters.

Credentialing delays don’t just frustrate administrators. They directly translate into untreated patients.

Access, Technology, and the “Power of Now”

Appropos Health was built around a simple insight: people are far more likely to succeed when support begins immediately (5).

The platform uses contingency management, a clinically validated approach that rewards patients for verified sobriety. Patients receive a Bluetooth-enabled breathalyzer and mobile app that collects breath alcohol samples three times daily. Each negative sample earns rewards, while the system tracks mood, location, and behavioral patterns over a 12-week program.

For clinicians, this means real data rather than self-reported recall. Instead of asking "how did last week go?" in a weekly session, a provider can pull up a graph showing exactly when a patient drank, identify patterns, and adjust care accordingly. During the interview, Johnson described a clinical trial with over 18,000 data points demonstrating reduced drinking episodes among participants.

Critically, patients can enroll and begin the same day: no waiting weeks for an intake appointment and no phone tag with referral coordinators. For rural patients without easy access to group therapy or specialist offices, the entire intervention happens through their phone.

But even the best treatment tools depend on having credentialed clinicians available to deploy them.

This is where Credential Network enters the picture.

Credential Network focuses on reducing the administrative friction that keeps clinicians sidelined: automating verifications, accelerating onboarding, and creating real-time visibility into credential status. When providers are cleared faster, capacity increases without training a single additional clinician.

Together, these approaches attack the same bottleneck from opposite ends:

• Appropos Health shortens the time from patient readiness to treatment.
• Credential Network shortens the time from clinician readiness to patient care.

Change Inertia: The Quiet Enemy of Healthcare

Healthcare doesn’t lack solutions; it struggles to adopt them.

Kim Johnson described a familiar phenomenon: change inertia. Even validated technologies can take a decade to spread through healthcare systems (3). Regulatory complexity, scope-of-practice concerns, and overburdened IT teams slow adoption further.

But many patients can’t wait a decade for the system to improve. 

For addiction care in particular, delays compound quickly. A patient lost today may return months later, or not at all.

Automation isn’t about replacing clinicians. It’s about removing obstacles that prevent them from practicing when and where they’re needed most

What Dry January Reveals About the Healthcare System

Dry January sheds light on a deeper truth: access to addiction care is not limited by compassion or clinical expertise. It’s limited by systems.

When credentialing takes too long, providers sit idle.
When referrals take too long, patients disengage.
When onboarding is manual and opaque, everyone loses.

Fixing these problems doesn’t require heroic effort. It requires dependable infrastructure.

A Different Future for Addiction Care

Imagine a clinician credentialed in days instead of months. Imagine a patient starting treatment the same week they ask for help. Imagine a system where motivation is met with support, not paperwork.

That future is already possible.

Dry January doesn’t have to be a symbolic pause. With the right systems in place, it can be a genuine point of intervention, one where fewer people fall through the cracks simply because the system moved too slowly.

At Credential Network, we believe faster credentialing isn’t just an administrative win. It’s a clinical one. And for patients seeking help in January or any month, that speed can save lives.