Literature Collection

INTRODUCTION: More health systems are implementing strategies to understand and address patient social health, also known as social health integration. We examine the impact of a pilot social health integration program in two primary care clinics in an integrated health care system on health care costs. METHODS: We randomized 534 patients who reported any social need between October 2022 - January 2023 to receive support from a centralized Connections Call Center (CCC) or clinic-based Community Resource Specialists (CRS). We used administrative and claims data to compare costs between programs incurred by the health care system over 9 months. Using an intent-to-treat approach, we used two-part models to estimate costs for behavioral health, emergency department, inpatient admissions, and urgent care. We estimated single-part models using generalized linear models for primary care, specialty care, and total costs. Our secondary as-treated analyses compared costs among those who received support from CRS to those who did not. RESULTS: Unadjusted results showed no significant differences between CRS and CCC participants. Adjusted findings showed that CRS participants had $286 higher primary care costs than CCC participants (95% CI: $63.61, $508.89). As-treated findings showed that those who received CRS assistance had $2,356 more specialty care costs (95% CI: $229, $4,482) than those who did not. CONCLUSIONS: Observed changes in primary and specialty care costs may be a result of increasing engagement with the health system that could support patients in managing their health and prevent avoidable utilization in the long-term. These findings can help inform others who are interested in adopting similar primary care interventions.

INTRODUCTION: The aim of this study was to assess differences in utilization outcomes among patients with social needs as part of a pilot social health integration program in 2 clinics in an integrated health system in the Pacific Northwest. METHODS: Patients who reported social needs between October 2022 and January 2023 were randomized to receive support from either local, clinic-based community resource specialists or a centralized Connections Call Center. The authors used administrative and claims data for 534 participants to compare the following utilization outcomes between arms over 9 months after randomization: primary care encounters, specialty care encounters, behavioral health encounters, emergency department encounters, inpatient admissions, urgent care encounters, and secure patient messages. Using an intent-to-treat approach, the authors used negative binomial regression models to compare visit counts and logistic regression to estimate differences in the probability of any emergency department visit or inpatient admissions between groups. The authors conducted secondary as-treated analyses comparing participants who received resource information from community resource specialists with those who did not. RESULTS: Unadjusted results showed no statistically significant differences between community resource specialists and Connections Call Center. Adjusted results showed that community resource specialist participants received 1.04 more primary care encounters than Connections Call Center participants (95% CI=0.336, 1.746). As-treated results showed that participants who received support from community resource specialists had higher counts of primary care encounters, specialty care encounters, and patient messages than those who did not. CONCLUSIONS: Beyond social needs navigation, clinic-based supports may be better integrated with care teams to provide ongoing support for patients' medical needs. Findings from this primary care social health pilot program showed that local, clinic-based support was associated with greater outpatient utilization than a call center support.

Background: Addressing the opioid crisis requires an understanding of how to train both health professional students and practicing clinicians on medications for opioid use disorder (mOUD). We designed a robust evaluation instrument to assess the impact of training on perceived clinical knowledge in these different categories of learners. Methods: We enrolled 3rd and 4th year medical, physician assistant (PA), and nurse practitioner (NP) students, as well as practicing PAs, NPs, and physicians to undertake the Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) Waiver Training for mOUD. We designed and implemented a cross-sectional survey to assess perceived change in clinical knowledge as a result of training in opioid use disorder and satisfaction with training. Results: Twenty-one MD/DO and 45 NP/PA students, and 24 practicing MD/DO and 27 NP/PAs completed the survey. Among health professional students (n = 66) and practicing clinicians (n =51), perceived clinical knowledge scores increased significantly (p < 0.001) for all 13 variables. Program evaluation scores for the buprenorphine waiver training were high with no statistical differences between students and practicing clinicians. Overall, the majority of participants indicated they would recommend the training to a colleague (Students' score = 4.84; practicing clinician scores = 4.53; scale = strongly disagree = 1 to strongly agree = 5). Conclusions: Our novel instrument allowed us to determine that the implementation of buprenorphine waiver trainings for health professional students and practicing clinicians leads to significant increases in perceived knowledge, interest and confidence in diagnosing and treating OUD. Although the buprenorphine waiver can now be obtained without training, many waivered providers still do not prescribe buprenorphine; integrating training into medical, NP, and PA curriculum for students and offering the training to practicing clinicians may increase confidence and uptake of mOUD.