Press Releases

Washington, D.C. - February 21, 2018 -- Today, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), a non-profit organization promoting safe and legal access to medical cannabis since  2002, and Releaf App, an experience tracking tool for cannabis patients, officially announced their partnership to empower medical cannabis patients and establish a new class of like-minded U.S. medical cannabis dispensaries.

The partnership aims to elevate the patient experience at dispensaries that are looking to provide enhanced services to their patients and staff. ASA’s projects, Patient Focused Certification (PFC) and Cannabis Care Certification (CCC), provide industry training for dispensary staff as well as free education for patients and caregivers. PFC helps medical cannabis dispensaries train staff while CCC’s Patient Education Program provides education for patients and caregivers who are starting or considering cannabis therapeutics. With Releaf App’s real-time experience tracking platform, patients can track and anonymously report how effective the cannabis varieties and products are in relieving their symptoms. Releaf App provides dispensaries with symptom-specific analytics from the treatment sessions recorded by their patients. Dispensaries then use this efficacy and rating information to provide more and better recommendations to other patients that share those same symptoms.

Today, most U.S. dispensaries display just a few key quantitative attributes about the cannabis varieties and products they offer their patients. Patients are left having to rely on the personal knowledge and experiences of dispensary staff or make a selection  without having enough information to predict effective treatment. By helping patients track how different medications make them feel, dispensaries learn & know how to best guide patients.

“Helping dispensaries provide free education to their clients is key to increasing safe access to medical cannabis. As the largest medical cannabis patient advocacy organization in the US, we know there is an increasing demand for proper education for patients and dispensary staff,” states Jahan Marcu, Ph.D., Director of Patient Focused Certification.

“The Releaf App is an incredible tool, both for new and more established medical cannabis patients, to monitor their medicine use in order to help determine which medicine would work best for them. If utilized it will improve public health outcomes and can help make cannabis an option to combat opioid use for certain types of chronic pain. By using the Releaf App, patients will not only be able to shape how a dispensary interacts with patients, but also how medical professionals do as well. The app can help educate medical professionals on their patients’ experiences, and can help end the stigma too often associated with medical cannabis.”

“There is a lot of talk today about seed-to-sale, but where does that leave the patients?  Sales are great, but we need to keep our focus on what matters most. On the other side of that sale is a patient trying to find out if cannabis can help them with their medical needs.” says Franco Brockelman, Releaf App’s CEO.  “We’re very excited to work with ASA to provide patients with the best tool possible to mindfully track and learn from their cannabis experiences and use that anonymized outcome data to strengthen feedback loops and improve patient-focused services for dispensaries that are ready to bring their services to the next level.”