Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #116702

Janice Pringle, Ph D, Scientific Director, Institute for Research, Education, and Training in Addictions (IRETA), 425 Sixth Avenue, Suite 1710, Pittsburgh, PA 15219, 412-391-4449, pringlej@ireta.org and Michael T. Flaherty, PhD, Director, Institute for Research, Education, and Addiction Services, 425 Sixth Avenue, Suite 1710, Pittsburgh, PA 15219.

States and other payers are increasingly focusing upon ways of demonstrating the efficiency, quality and accountability of their addiction treatment system. The Institute for Research, Education and Training in Addiction (IRETA) located within Pennsylvania has partnered with the state's Department of Health and with a leadership group comprised of payers, purchasers, providers, patients and researchers to develop a learning system that will accomplish this goal. This system, entitled the Addiction Elimination Learning System, is based upon the assumption that changing a complex system – such as addiction treatment – requires an alignment of system components along organizational and systemic axes. The components of the AELS for both the system and organizational levels include: Leadership, Learning (Internal and External), Performance Measurement, and a state-of-the-art Disease State Management model. The principles of the model are multidisciplinary arising from the business and systems change literature. The paper will present the results of applying this model within Pennsylvania at both the organizational and systems level. Performance data and qualitative observations will be presented.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand how the literature supports systems change with complex processes;
• Understand a typology for measuring addiction treatment performance, and how this typology has been sucessfully used by specific treatment programs;
• Understand the elements of an addiction treatment system and how these elements can be aligned to bring about systems change.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.