This is a the
second blog about healthcare costs and substance use disorders (SUD). The first
one (6 Sept 2012) dealt with healthcare costs among patients who presented for
treatment for SUD. This one is from the same great health services research
group founded and anchored by Connie Weisner at UCSF, and addresses a novel
topic: the healthcare costs of family members of patients with SUD, and the
effect of SUD outcomes (abstinence vs. non-abstinence) in the index patient on
family members’ healthcare costs (Weisner, Parthasarathy et al. 2010).
In this study, a
group of patients who presented for treatment for SUD (and who were thus likely
to have chronic or recurrent, and more severe, SUD, compared to people not
presenting for treatment) were followed for 5 years. One year following
treatment entry, they were asked questions pertaining to their current (past 30
day) use of a wide variety of intoxicants. Those who had used none in the
previous 30 days were considered abstinent for study purposes, while those who
had used anything were considered non-abstinent. (Note that in other studies as
well as this one, 30-day abstinence at the 12 month time point is strongly related
to longest continuous period of abstinence over the entire five years.) Also
over this 5 year period, healthcare costs of family members were also tracked,
and family members whose index patient were abstinent at 1 year were compared
to those who were not. Just to avoid confusion, I’ll state that differently:
healthcare costs for families over a 5 year period were compared between those
whose family member was either abstinent or not for the past 30 days 1 year
after treatment entry.
The results were both
surprising and encouraging. First, the authors point out that in the first year
following treatment entry, healthcare costs for family members may well go up,
as they attend to medical, SUD and psychiatric problems they neglected due to
the crisis associated with escalating use and problems in the SUD patients.
Thus, it is important to long past the one-year point. Thus, a major strength
of the study is that they studied costs over five years. Another strength is
that they compared both groups to matched controls without SUD.
And sure enough,
in the first two years, healthcare costs were higher among both groups of
family members of SUD patients compared to non-SUD control families but were
not different between abstinent and non-abstinent groups. However, beginning in
the third year the abstinent began to diverge from the non-abstinent families.
By year 5, the abstinent family members’ costs were not different from the
non-SUD controls, while the non-abstinent family members’ were significantly
higher. Average cost for abstinent family members at year five was $3 per
member per month, while average cost for non-abstinent family members was $36
per member per month, a 12-fold difference!
In summary,
30-day abstinence one year after treatment for SUD strongly predicted the costs
for their family members over the ensuing four years. Healthcare costs of
family members of SUD patients abstinent at one year began to go down three
years following treatment and by year five, did not differ from control families
without SUD. However, costs for family members of SUD patients not abstinent at
one year were 12 times higher than for either abstinent SUD families or for
control families! Thus, SUD outcomes are strongly related not only to
healthcare costs of the SUD patients themselves but to their families as well!
A lot of money
could be saved (not to mention the misery that could be avoided) by improving
rates of abstinence following SUD treatment. Other studies, by this and other
groups, have found that providing ongoing continuing care over long periods is
associated with improved rates of abstinence and reduced healthcare costs among
SUD patients (see previous blog.)
To me, these
findings have two implications:
1)
Current, evidence-based treatment needs to be
more widely available to people and, to encourage them to come, they need to
include a lot more consumer choice about path to recovery, as well as form and
place of treatment, and
2)
We need more research on how to improve rates of
abstinence, which are far too low to be acceptable. This will require more
money. The only way to get more money for addiction research is advocacy by the
people affected: people with SUD, recovering from SUD, and their friends and
families. We need to advocate not just for more treatment, but for more money for research. More on this
later.
Thanks for the great post on your blog, it really gives me an insight on this topic.
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