Associations between Patient Experience and Addiction Treatment Facility Services: Results of the Addiction Treatment Locator, Assessment, and Standards Surveys

Abstract

Objectives Patient experience and presence of evidence-based facility services are 2 dimensions of assessing quality of addiction treatment facilities. However, the relationship between these two is not well described. The objective of this study was to explore associations between patient experience measures and service offerings at addiction treatment facilities. Methods We used data from cross-sectional surveys of addiction treatment facilities and persons involved in treatment at corresponding facilities to identify facility services (eg, availability of medications for alcohol use disorder, assistance with obtaining social services, etc) and patient experience measures (overall facility rating, extent helped by treatment, ability to deal with daily problems after treatment), respectively. We used hierarchical multiple logistic regression to test for associations between top-box scores for each patient experience outcome and facility services. Results We analyzed 9191 patient experience surveys from 149 facilities. Assistance with obtaining social services (adjusted odds ratio [95% confidence interval], 0.43 [0.28–0.66]) was associated with lower overall treatment facility ratings. Childcare (2.00 [1.04–3.84]) was associated with top-box scores for extent helped. Availability of cognitive behavioral therapy (2.67 [1.25–5.73]) and childcare (1.77 [1.08–2.92]) were associated with top-box scores for ability to deal with daily problems after treatment. Assistance with obtaining social services (0.61 [0.41–0.90]) was associated with lower scores for ability to deal with problems after treatment. Conclusions Few addiction treatment facility services were associated with patient experience measures. Future work should explore bridging the gap between evidence-based services and positive patient experiences.