Treatment Innovations: Perspectives From Addiction Providers Integrating Primary Care

Addiction provider organizations increasingly provide onsite primary care to the people they serve through partnerships with community health centers or by expanding their in-house capacity. This recent trend is a direct result of national health reform’s emphasis on improving healthcare coordination. Also, the integration of addiction treatment and primary care can help address often interrelated physical illnesses and substance abuse by ensuring higher quality care. In fact, clinical trials have demonstrated that when someone has a substance abuse problem and one or more non-substance related disorders, integrated care can be more effective than traditional treatment delivery (i.e., separate, siloed primary care and substance abuse programs) in terms of clinical outcome and cost. It results in better health outcomes for individuals, in contrast to back-and-forth referrals between behavioral health and primary care offices that lead to roughly 80% of individuals not receiving care.

To explore what we can learn from earlier adopters of addiction treatment-primary care integration, the SAMHSA-HRSA Center for Integrated Health Solutions convened a meeting with a number of addiction treatment providers from across the country already integrating primary care services for an in-depth discussion about their efforts.

This interactive webinar will explore the practical knowledge and on-the-ground experiences of three of these providers, which are also represented in CIHS’ new report, Innovations in Addictions Treatment: Addiction Treatment Providers Working with Integrated Primary Care Services. (We encourage you to read this report in advance to get the most out of your webinar experience)

The webinar will enable you to ask direct questions of providers already engaged in the integration process to learn some of the challenges and opportunities of integrating primary care services, as well as the costs and benefits of addiction treatment-primary care integration.