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Integrated Services in Substance Abuse Treatment: Implications for Implementation of the Affordable Care Act
Saturday, January 17, 2015: 8:00 AM-9:45 AM
Balconies K, Fourth Floor (New Orleans Marriott)
Cluster: Substance Misuse and Addictive Behaviors
Symposium Organizer:
Jeanne C. Marsh, PhD, University of Chicago
Passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is generating changes in the financing, organization and accessibility of health and social services in the United States. The focus on integrated models of service delivery offers unprecedented opportunities to understand and improve the integration of health, behavioral health and social services at both the system- and service- levels. This symposium will bring together analyses of service delivery models that have been implemented across specialty and non-specialty substance abuse service settings and examine their prevalence, their organizational and service characteristics and their impact on client outcomes. Social workers have been actively engaged in the study of comprehensive, integrated care models – specifically, models that bring together health, mental health and social services to coordinate care and improve outcomes -- typically under rubrics of integrated services, comprehensive services, wrap around services, and intensive case management. This symposium is designed to articulate distinctions among models and to identify “active ingredients” of models that may have greatest impact on client outcomes.
The symposium will draw on research on integrated services and substance abuse treatment outcome that used four large-scale data sets: data from the National Survey of the Substance Abuse Treatment System (NSSATS), a survey administered annually to 12,519 substance Abuse treatment programs in the U.S.; data generated from publicly funded Addiction Health Services treatment programs in Los Angeles, CA in 2010-11; data from an experimental analysis of the Illinois Title IV-E Alcohol and other Drug Waiver Demonstration; and data from the National Treatment Improvement Evaluation Study (NTIES), a prospective study of comprehensive care in substance abuse treatment programs across the U.S.. All papers in the symposium will address the following three questions:
(1) What are the organizational and service factors that characterize successful service integration efforts?
(2) What specific components of service integration models have a positive impact on key substance abuse treatment outcomes?
(3) What are implications for developing integration strategies that increase accessibility and effectiveness of behavioral health defined as mental health and substance abuse services in the context of the Affordable Care Act.
* noted as presenting author
