At the APHA Conference

At the recent American Public Health Association (APHA) conference in Philadelphia, SAMHSA experts discussed the Agency’s Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) program’s evaluation results.

The SBIRT program represents a major advance in the approach to addressing substance use issues and the role of specialty and healthcare treatment systems. It is important to examine which models of SBIRT may offer the greatest potential to improve the U.S. addiction treatment and heath care systems. To this end, CSAT funded a Cross-Site Evaluation to conduct a multisite evaluation of the effects of SBIRT as implemented in six states and one tribal organization.

SAMHSA’s Jack Stein (left), discusses the SBIRT evaluation report with panelists. Mr. Stein served as moderator.

The SBIRT cross-site infrastructure supports three interrelated evaluation efforts: process, impact/outcome, and economic. The process evaluation serves the critical role of establishing the overall evaluation’s context and consequently aids in the interpretation of its findings; it also describes the content of grantees’ interventions and their underlying logic models along with their sustainability.

The outcome evaluation provides information on what impact the SBIRT interventions have had on the patients, health care practitioners, and grantees and intermediary organizations involved. It also provides evidence on how specific practitioner and programmatic characteristics relate to effectiveness at the patient and community levels.

Read more about the APHA presentation.