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Leading addiction treatment organizations are moving quickly to use patient data to improve treatment effectiveness and reporting the following key benefits: 

Vista Research Group held two Outcomes Summits for our addiction treatment clients this year.  In addition to being a heck of a lot of fun (really!), we’ve learned several interesting things:

As we analyzed treatment completion data for Vista’s first Outcomes Summit last week, we were surprised by the wide range of treatment completion rates among our clients.  Among short-term residential treatment programs, for example, the percentage of patients who successfully completed treatment ranged between 43% and 97%.

By monitoring the severity of underlying co-occurring disorders, progress monitoring has proven to help patients in addiction treatment get better faster.  But deeply-uncomfortable patients in the throes of acute withdrawal may find it difficult to answer detailed questions.

John Oliver aired a devastating expose of the addiction treatment industry Sunday night on his show Last Week Tonight.  How should the industry respond? 

As the number of overdose deaths continue to climb, one would think that every addiction treatment center in the United States would be busting at the seams. Instead, many centers are fighting for survival, and far too many are losing the battle.

Now that many state licensing organizations have joined the Joint Commission in requiring treatment programs to use patient-reported feedback to inform clinical care, centers are exploring a variety of different options.  Should you consider building your own?

Because behavioral health care is so far behind other areas of health care in using data to measure treatment effectiveness, excellent treatment programs have no way to differentiate themselves from those with mediocre outcomes.  It is time for this to change.