Chief Architect
ASAM
David R. Gastfriend, M.D., DFASAM is an addiction psychiatrist, Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer at DynamiCare Health, Inc., and Chief Architect at ASAM for the ASAM CONTINUUM software system.
On the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 25 years, he directed addiction research at Massachusetts General Hospital and was an investigator in the NIDA Cocaine Collaborative Study, NIAAA’s COMBINE Study and NIDA’s Clinical Trials Network. From 2004-13, Dr. Gastfriend was Vice President for Scientific Communications at Alkermes, Inc., where he supported gaining FDA approval of extended-release naltrexone (VIVITROL®) for the treatment of alcohol and opioid dependence and directed scientific publications and presentations on clinical, justice systems, and health economic research in addiction. He has also served as Senior Research Scientist and CEO at the Treatment Research Institute of Philadelphia.
His research led most U.S. states to endorse the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) Criteria. His 150 scientific publications include the books The ASAM Criteria and Addiction Treatment Matching. The algorithms he developed for ASAM CONTINUUM – The ASAM Criteria Decision Engine® and ASAM’s CO-Triage® tools are being adopted nationwide. He is a Distinguished Fellow of ASAM and the 2012 recipient of ASAM’s McGovern Award and Lecture for contributions to addiction treatment and society.
In 2016, he co-founded DynamiCare Health, a nationally-scalable technology for delivering Contingency Management and predictive analytics, with four grants from the NIH and support from the states of Massachusetts, Ohio, and Vermont. The system has won Anthem Health Care's Platinum Award, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' MassChallenge accelerator competition, Governor John Kasich's $1 million Ohio Opioid Technology Challenge, Harvard Business School's New Ventures Global Grand Prize, and the New York Times Good Tech Award. He has consulted to the national governments of Belgium, China, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Russia, and the U.S.
