Hospital’s addiction consult team helps reduce readmissions for patients with substance use disorders

BOSTON--In 2014, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) started an inpatient addiction consult team consisting of a rotating group of addiction medicine and psychiatry physicians, advanced practice nurses, social workers, recovery coaches, and trainees. A recent study reveals that hospitalized patients with substance use disorders who are seen by the team are less likely to be readmitted to the hospital within a month after discharge.

The study, which is published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, noted that since 2014, the team completed consults for 4,719 unique patients, and there were 7,489 hospital admissions that included one or more consults. Alcohol and opioid use disorders were the most frequently seen diagnoses.

Receiving an addiction consultation was associated with a reduced 30-day hospital readmission rate—there was a 22.5% readmission rate after hospital stays before consultation vs. a 13.8% rate after consultation. This impact on readmission persisted for subsequent hospital stays that did not involve addiction consultations (a 19.1% readmission rate).

“Starting an addiction consult team requires new resources, but its association with reduced readmissions may allow institutions to make a case for the value of this model in addition to the clinical benefit to individual patients,” said lead author Sarah E. Wakeman, MD, Medical Director of Mass General’s Substance Use Disorders Initiative and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard University.

Wakeman noted that addiction consult teams may help reduce hospital readmission rates by helping patients obtain appropriate medication treatment and connect to ongoing outpatient care for substance use disorders.

The work represented in the manuscript was funded by MGH. In addition, Wakeman received research support from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (1H79TI081442-01), the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and received salary support from OptumLabs as a co-investigator on a research project during the study period.

About the Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In August 2019, Mass General was named #2 in the U.S. News & World Report list of "America’s Best Hospitals."