Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This article reviews controlled studies of continuing care conducted over the prior 20 years. The results indicate that continuing care interventions were more likely to produce positive treatment effects when they had a longer planned duration, made more active efforts to deliver treatment to patients, and were studied more recently.
However, there was considerable variability in patient response and room for improvements in participation rates and effectiveness. It is possible that the effectiveness of continuing care interventions could be further improved by the use of adaptive algorithms, which adjust treatment over time on the basis of changes in patients' symptoms and status.
The use of alternative service delivery methods and care settings may also lead to greater engagement and retention in continuing care, particularly among the large numbers of individuals who do not want traditional, clinic-based specialty care. Keywords: continuing care, substance use disorders, adaptive treatment, review, retention. These new models have the potential to bring addiction treatment into a new era, in which care will be provided in contemporary patient-centered models designed to effectively manage chronic disorders IOM, ; Wagner et al.
These changes are being driven by a number of factors, including progressive leadership at the state and local level, greater open-mindedness and pragmatism among treatment providers, increasing insistence from all stake holders for better outcomes, and a series of influential publications that have pointed out the similarities between addiction and other chronic disorders and the limitations of the addiction treatment system as currently constituted McLellan et al.
In addition, there is a growing research literature on continuing care that has provided important information on the effectiveness on various interventions and management practices, ranging from more traditional step focused group counseling approaches to flexible extended care models.
