Telehealth Substance Use Treatment Faces Test Amid COVID and Moving Forward

by Peter Johnson

To recover from addiction, people with substance use disorders (SUDs) need support from providers and their peers. As quarantine has become a way of life, and gatherings have been banned in most states for the foreseeable future, both are hard to come by. One possible solution is telehealth, but experts say that remote, tech-aided treatment for addiction is still largely unproven — and most payers and providers don’t have experience with it.

There is "a lack of epidemiological and outcome data," on the present status of people with SUDs, said Carlos Blanco, M.D., director of the Division of Epidemiology, Services, and Prevention Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, during a May 18 webinar, organized by the National Institute for Health Care Management. "So although we suspect that there have been increases in substance use and substance use disorders [during the COVID-19 pandemic], we don’t have the data to know this for sure."

The federal government has made moves to facilitate SUD treatment via telehealth while patients are self-isolating. However, as Blanco explained, the lack of data means there is a fly-by-night quality to SUD treatment during the pandemic. Providers and payers are being forced to provide treatment that may not work, and patients may not know they can use the new modalities.

"The quality of [SUD] care is largely dependent on continuously following up with folks," says Jerry Vitti, CEO of Healthcare Financial, Inc. "For folks with barriers, that’s especially hard….And unfortunately, the gap is growing between the need and the provision of telemedicine."

According to Kevin Hallgren, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and a researcher at the University of Washington's Behavioral Research in Technology and Engineering Center, practitioners face an array of challenges in adapting SUD treatment to a telehealth modality.

"There are many types of substance use treatment settings. There are many types of SUD treatment patients — finding the right match for the right person at the right time in the right setting is a very complicated thing," Hallgren tells AIS Health.

Thus, Hallgren worries that the health care industry could make a mistake by moving too quickly toward unproven telehealth services during the pandemic.

From Health Plan Weekly