Albany County approves $140,000 contract for recovery-support app from Chess Health

The Albany County Legislature on a voice vote authorized an agreement with Chess Health to license a mobile recovery-support application and amended the county's 2025 multi-county budget to include $140,000 from opioid settlement funds.

County public health staff described the award during the legislature's September meeting as the third phase of the county's opioid settlement disbursements, following earlier awards to community agencies and county departments. Dr. Giordano said the contract is for a phone app intended to support people in recovery, and that five community agencies as well as county departments that work with people in recovery are expected to partake in the licensing.

Dr. Giordano said the app "will work 24 7. We hope to have 5 community agencies, partake in the licensing of this as well as all the county departments that touch the lives of people that might be in recovery." He described the product as offering "24 7 crisis support," an online option for meetings, a resource library and "real time tracking of individuals' progress." He added that the app could connect people in treatment to their treatment provider's network.

During questions, Legislator Lane asked whether the service connects users to live people or only automated responses, saying, "Do they speak to actual persons or they just do a chat bot type?" Dr. Giordano said the RFP required human crisis response and peer support and that that was a strength of Chess Health's proposal: "the RFP was written, specifically requiring for the crisis response, the human being, and for any interventions, where there was a contact with the company with actual peers in recovery." He said some proposals relied more on automated or AI approaches and that Chess Health scored highly because of the human-peer component.

The county staff reported there were five proposals reviewed and that Chess Health was the successful proposer. The legislature moved the authorization on a voice vote; individual roll-call votes were not recorded in the meeting transcript.

The agreement uses opioid settlement funds allocated by the county. County staff framed this authorization as one element of a phased disbursement plan for those settlement funds.

Participants: Dr. Giordano and Adam Kirkman, opioid-settlement coordinator, presented the item. The motion to authorize the agreement was made from the floor and carried by voice vote; the meeting record does not list individual recorded votes.