Implementation of an Addiction Severity Index Education Lecture at Marana Integrative Healthcare

Abstract

Purpose: This quality improvement project aimed to increase provider and staff knowledge at an integrated care organization of the addiction severity index screener and their intention to use the instrument to manage opiate use disorder patient treatment. Background: American opiate use disorder prevalence has led to unprecedented public health concerns, crippling treatment expenses, and growing death tolls to create a national crisis. Of the 67,367 substance-related mortalities in 2018 alone, 70% (46,802 overdoses) involved opioids, putting into perspective the drug class’ pervasive nature. Several treatment solutions have been trialed but often fail to adequately address opiate users’ complex social and medical demands that necessitate more intensive care. The addiction severity index is a research-supported method of identifying and measuring these problem areas related to drug usage to provide more intuitive addiction treatment management. Methods: This project applied a one-group, asynchronous, pretest-posttest quantitative design that assessed participants’ addiction severity index knowledge and intention to use the tool before and after interventional learning. An online PowerPoint presentation delivered the intervention to six healthcare professionals that were anticipated to utilize the tool’s collected data for their patient care duties. Email instructions directed interested participants to Qualtrics to take a 17-item pretest, complete the intermediate addiction severity index training, and finish with a 19-item post-test. Both surveys collected demographic, multiple-choice, and Likert survey data. The total time commitment was 45-minutes, and access to the training was available for two weeks. Results: The six participants’ pre- to post-test correctly answered multiple-choice questions measuring addiction severity index knowledge increased from 47.2% to 75% (+27.8% increase). Improvement was also captured in participants’ cumulative Likert votes of ‘strongly agree’ intention to use the instrument from 16 (pre-test) to 28 (post-test) votes (+12 votes; 14.3% increase). Conclusions: Conveying the addiction severity index's relative advantage in addiction treatment proved sufficient to favorably change the provider and staff's attitude and behaviors towards the intervention. The implications of these findings suggest that increased use of the screening tool is likely, and subsequently, will promote improved opiate use disorder patient safety.