KFI-AM 640: Cedars-Sinai to Test New Opioid Abuse Treatment Method
KFI-AM 640 recently ran a City News Service story on a $5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded to the Cedars-Sinai Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences to lead a study on opioid use disorder in hospitalized patients.
"Hospitalization represents a critical window of opportunity to identify underlying health problems or disparities and initiate interventions to address them," co-principal investigator Itai Danovitch, MD, chair of the Cedars-Sinai Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, said in the article. "Opioid use disorders are a very compelling example of this, because once somebody is hospitalized for an overdose, their long-term risk of returning to the hospital is exceptionally high."
Investigators at Cedars-Sinai, Santa Monica-based RAND Corp., the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Baystate Health in Springfield, Massachusetts, will evaluate a new model of care that aims to identify individuals with opioid use disorders, start them on treatment and directly link them to aftercare programs in the community.
The intervention will involve a consultative care team, including a care manager and physician specializing in addiction treatment, who will guide medical and surgical teams to help them incorporate evidence-based treatments for addiction. Such teams have been established at several hospitals across the country but have never been evaluated in a patient-level ,randomized, controlled trial.
Offering addiction treatment and getting patients on the road to recovery "has a profound impact on health and also helps to reduce avoidable readmissions and health care costs," Danovitch said in the article. "This is an opportunity to improve value for patients and improve efficiency for systems of care."
Click here to read the complete story from KFI radio.