Narconon International and Psychometric Technologies Incorporated worked together to develop a scientific method for routine outcome monitoring that would be beneficial to treatment providers.
Canadian, Oklahoma (PRWEB) December 23, 2013
One of the most important assets of a product-driven business or company is their ability to improve their product based on the outcome of its use. This means that they must contact their customers after use of the product, receive honest reviews, and look into and improve their delivery or product based on those reviews.
Individuals who are seeking effective drug rehabilitation treatment may have very specific concerns they are trying to address. They may want to know if the treatment program includes substitute medical drugs to aid with withdrawal and emotional turmoil, they may want to know if the treatment program is residential or out-patient, they may want to know if the treatment program will include group counseling and they may want to know how expensive or inexpensive the drug treatment program is. Finding the right treatment program for the individual drug addict does include answering these points, of course, but it also includes learning about the statistics of the facility and program’s success with individual participants and graduates.
Drug rehabilitation treatment programs may be marked as effective based on a couple of key points: do they assist the individual through withdrawal from drugs and do they counsel the individual so that they experience relief from the emotional effects of drug use? However, these points are still limited in that they look at short-term gains but don’t explore whether individuals who have participated in the program have been successful in maintaining a drug-free life after program completion. When a facility does not research and measure sobriety rates, it also misses the opportunity to improve its results based on their program graduates’ successes or failures.
Narconon Arrowhead’s Outcome Monitoring
A study recently published in the Journal of Substance Abuse Research and Treatment, OK, highlighted the goals of routine outcome monitoring as a way to ensure that treatment effectiveness is reproducible client to client, that treatment is cost-effective and consistently high-quality, and that health service providers are responsible for maintaining the quality of their treatment by monitoring their outcomes.
Narconon International and Psychometric Technologies Incorporated worked together to develop a scientific method for routine outcome monitoring that would be beneficial to treatment providers. The scientific method that resulted from this collaboration was piloted at Narconon Arrowhead.
Many treatment providers are limited in their outcome monitoring abilities because they have difficulty tracking their clients after they leave treatment and they have few or no staff devoted to collecting follow-up information on clients. In contrast, the Narconon Arrowhead program consists of steps that help staff efficiently proceed into outcome monitoring after a student attains program graduation. This includes collecting a variety of information upon client enrollment like the client’s addiction severity index rating, having fewer staff than students so that the staff can spend more time getting to know the individual students and helping them through the phases of treatment, quality control procedures to ensure that treatment quality meets high standards, and an in-house ability to correct problems with treatment delivery or quality. About one week prior to their graduation, Narconon Arrowhead program students meet with a trained staff member who is devoted exclusively to helping them create an individualized plan for successfully re-entering their community.
The success of Narconon Arrowhead program graduates in going on to live drug-free, productive lives is due to their highly successful treatment program and their comprehensive follow-up and outcome monitoring procedures. This study of a successful outcome monitoring procedure provides an ideal for other treatment providers who are invited to contact Narconon Arrowhead for support in implementing the simplified system.
For more information on Narconon Arrowhead’s Outcome Monitoring system or treatment approach, visit their site at http://www.narcononarrowhead.org or call 800-468-6933.