Jordan Carlisle takes on COO role for Northwest Arkansas healthcare startup Sober Sidekick

Bentonville entrepreneur Chris Thompson says Jordan Carlisle has been a go-to relationship for founders and investors interested in Northwest Arkansas as an emerging hub for healthcare innovation.

He knows that first-hand. Thompson is the CEO and founder of Sidekick Mobile Technologies, creators of Sober Sidekick. Backed by the American Heart Association as lead investor, Sober Sidekick is a healthcare engagement platform designed to help those struggling with substance abuse maintain their sobriety.

This past summer, Carlisle, formerly the director of digital health at Alice Walton’s Whole Health Institute (WHI) in Bentonville, started working with Sober Sidekick as a consultant. He said he was interested in the startup because of Thompson’s “relentless focus” on building and engaging with individuals working to better their health.

“The Sober Sidekick team has implemented hundreds of experiments to engineer peer-to-peer connections on our platform that guarantee anyone needing help will receive support within minutes, if not seconds,” Carlisle said. “I’ve worked with and studied thousands of tech startups, and that meticulous focus on what users want leads to massively successful companies. It’s rare to find that level of focus on user experience in healthcare.”

Earlier this year, Carlisle, 34, joined Sober Sidekick full time as chief operating officer and partner. His focus is building strategy and systems for product development and sales. That’ll help the company continue its exponential growth.

Thompson, 30, launched the app in January 2019, just a few months after ending five years of alcohol addiction. A Pennsylvania native, he relocated to Northwest Arkansas from Los Angeles in early 2022.

Since Carlisle joined the company, Sober Sidekick has doubled its member base from 200,000 to nearly 500,000 members and has closed paid pilots with nationwide Medicaid plans.

“Our growth directly results from our focus on building the best user experience possible and making our platform easy to find,” Carlisle said. “When more people join Sober Sidekick, our community strengthens, our insights on what to build become more evident, and our rankings in the Apple and Google app stores increase.”

The Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce hired Carlisle as vice president of economic development and entrepreneurship in June 2018. In the spring of 2020, he joined the founding team at WHI, facilitating digital health market tracking and evaluation for the world’s most innovative companies.

“I believed in Alice’s vision for the way that technology will empower individuals to become stewards of their health,” he said. “And the way that data and AI [artificial intelligence] will make whole-person care and value-based reimbursement for care feasible.”

Carlisle said Sober Sidekick’s top goal for 2024 is partnering with health insurers and providers that align with the company’s purpose — connecting people in recovery with the right resources at the right time before relapses happen.

“We have the largest dataset of user-reported relapses in the United States, which means we can predict when our members are likely to relapse,” he explained. “Traditional treatments for addiction are expensive and reactive, but with Sober Sidekick, we can reach people more proactively to save lives and reduce the costs of care.”