Finding effective addiction treatment — a program that addresses the individual’s specific needs — is difficult. Throw in insurance vs. no insurance; location; dual diagnosis treatment and the like, and it becomes even more difficult.
Adi Jaffe, a doctoral student at UCLA, himself a former drug dealer and meth addict, founded All About Addiction (A3), which has recently launched a treatment program finder, the A3 Rehab Finder. When asked about A3′s new rehab finder, Adi had this to say:
Why – I decided to put together the rehab-finder because I thought it was sad that with all the technology we have, the best way to find treatment was either to do a general google search (cue paid ads by providers that charge a lot and can therefore pay for advertising) that results in lists upon lists of providers, or go the SAMHSA treatment locator, which only searches by location. I thought we could do better. I believe that if we can make it easier for people to find the right treatment we will increase enrollment in treatment (because people will find treatment they can afford) and improve treatment outcomes (because the treatment-client fit will improve).
The idea came to me years ago in the form of an actual call center, but not having the money to do anything like that, I had to figure out something smaller, hence the online tool, which by now is probably the better option anyway.
How – When clients fill out our form in its entirety, we have more than 20 different variables to use when choosing the right provider for them. For the most part, we don’t match people based on the treatment approach (CBT, MI, 12 step, or others), that’s been tried and failed – there seems to be little difference and we don’t know how to match there yet. What we do is match on gender, age, insurance, mental health status, specific addiction specialty, and other factors like the need for detox, specific treatments for specific drugs (like buprenorphine for heroin). Overall, we get pretty good matches, especially when the alternative, or lack thereof, is considered. The next step for us (I’m applying for funding right now) is to run an actual study assessing the effectiveness of this thing. I’d like to set up a few different versions (including a location-only search like SAMHSA’s) and see if our version works better. It also lends itself to constant improvement based on the actual results obtained. I’m kind of hoping to make this one of my long-term research projects…
So check it out — Adi is looking for feedback and would love to know what works and doesn’t work about A3′s new rehab locator.
