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Using technology to promote integration of care
Addiction Science & Clinical Practice volume 10, Article number: A20 (2015)
This work focuses on the role that technology can play in integrating addiction, mental health, and medical care services. Behavioral health is being integrated into primary care, spurred by the promise of improved patient outcomes and cost savings. Integration enables providers to care for the whole patient—who often has co-occurring behavioral and physical illnesses. Integration requires change of both organizations and individuals, and technology can play a key role in facilitating both. Technology makes more data available to clinicians and provides tools (such as prediction models, decision-support protocols, and dashboards) to understand clinical data. Among individuals, technology can help patients, family members, and clinicians stay informed and engaged in treatment. Technology can: 1) help identify optimal combinations of interventions for different combinations of conditions; 2) include a greater number of conditions in screening; 3) send reminders and alerts based on data from sensors; and 4) make chronic disease self-management more effective. This study presents a systematic review of the literature on the use of mobile health technology for the treatment of alcoholism; the relationship between utilization of mobile health technology and in-person care; early findings from a project aimed at implementing mobile health technology for addiction; and the role of telemedicine in aiding access to medication-assisted treatment for opioid dependence.
Trial registration
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01003119
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01963234
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01702142
Grant support
NIAAA 5R01AA017192-05
NIDA 5R01DA034279-03
NIDA 5R01DA030431-03
NIDA 1R34DA036720-01A1
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Andrew Quanbeck, Lisa A Marsch, Fiona McTavish, Randall T Brown, Marie-Louise Mares, Roberta Johnson, Joseph E Glass, Amy K Atwood, Helene McDowell, Andrew Isham, Todd Molfenter, Jee-Seon Kim, Terry Patel-Porter, Sandy Starr, Carol Sherbeck, Mark Zehner, Dennis McCarty, and Judy Ganch for their contributions to this research.
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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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Gustafson, D.H. Using technology to promote integration of care. Addict Sci Clin Pract 10 (Suppl 1), A20 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/1940-0640-10-S1-A20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1940-0640-10-S1-A20