NIDA CHALLENGE PRIZE WINNER JEREMY MARTINEZ-CAOD-2015-NIDA-001

Investigators

Abstract

Through the ??Innovations in Measuring and Managing Addiction Treatment Quality?? Challenge (the ??Challenge??), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), challenges the general public to make concrete advances toward improving the quality of addiction treatment. Specifically, through this Challenge, NIDA hopes to incentivize the development of innovative concepts for quality measurement and quality management systems based on the latest science of addiction and its treatment and of quality measurement and management. These new concepts would be game-changing because they would go beyond current performance measurement concepts in that they would not be limited by the data commonly available in current provider and payer data systems. Instead, they would (a) more directly reflect the clinical effects that can and should be expected from high-quality addiction treatment; (b) capture what clinicians and provider organizations need to measure to help them provide high quality addiction treatment; and (c) provide a solid basis or measuring clinician and provider performance that may be used by patients and other purchasers to select and incent high quality treatment. NIDA believes that the development of such quality measures and management systems has the potential to meaningfully improve the quality of addiction treatment both by giving clinicians and providers the information they need to assess and improve the quality of the care they provide and by providing tools patients and purchasers can use to shop for the highest quality providers, allowing market forces to provide another incentive for improvement.