Can Outpatient Drug Rehab Work?

Drug and alcohol addiction continue to plague too many Americans. Its costs can be measured both monetarily and in the staining imprint it leaves on our homes and communities.

Estimates of the total overall costs of substance abuse in the United States, including productivity and health- and crime-related costs, exceed $600 billion annually. As staggering as these numbers are, they do not fully describe the breadth of destructive public health and safety implications of drug abuse and addiction, such as family disintegration, loss of employment, failure in school, domestic violence, and child abuse.

This is an issue of paramount importance to the healthcare industry on multiple levels – from the cost for insurance companies to cover treatment for addicts to emerging ACOs concerned with managing the health of defined populations to the civic responsibility ideally shared by all healthcare providers. As our industry wrestles with how to conscientiously respond to this challenge, it is becoming increasingly evident that more attention should be paid to value that intensive outpatient treatment can bring. Here’s why:

• In an outpatient program, people can continue to manage the day-to-day details of their lives, even while they access very real treatment for their addictions. By scheduling treatment appointments around their other obligations, they can hold down a job and tend to family needs.  Often ties like these become important motivators in reminding people of why they want to improve in the first place. 

• While inpatient rehab programs provide round-the-clock care, for some that can also be a disadvantage. Being sequestered from the world makes it challenging to maintain employment or a personal relationship while also denying participants access to the friends and family who can provide needed support during this difficult time. In addition, people going through inpatient treatment have to wait until after leaving their program to truly put what they learned to use while a person in an outpatient program learns how to deal with these challenges during treatment.

• Outpatient care generally costs less, sometimes far less, than inpatient/residential care. People enrolled in outpatient treatment supply their own living spaces and their own food, and there is fewer staff hours involved in direct care. This results in significant cost savings for the insurance company, the healthcare industry as a whole, and/or the individual.

• An intensive outpatient program for alcoholics, addicts and their families provides patients with individualized programs designed to fit their unique therapeutic needs. Set in a discreet and professional setting, intensive programs can consist of impactful group sessions supplemented with individualized and one-on-one therapy and counseling. Through this patients are given specific tools to break destructive cycles and the information needed to understand and manage the physiological, emotional and other conditions that lead to dependency and compulsive behavior. Some programs even incorporate groundbreaking brain assessment and therapy customized for each client.

Outpatient therapy isn’t right for everyone. For example, treatment specialists will usually not recommend outpatient rehab for patients who they feel require supervised or medically assisted treatment because of the dangers associated with their particular addictions. But outpatient treatment is often right for individuals seeking treatment for the first time; those seeking post-inpatient or continued support; and families who have a need to better understand the chaos, destruction and seemingly unexplainable behavior.

As healthcare leaders continue to look for sensible solutions that provide access to care at a price point that makes sense, we encourage health plans, family practice physicians and other healthcare participants to take a fresh look at outpatient therapy for addicts. Many such programs offer the education, insight, compassion and everyday tools that addicts and those around them need to move forward and not look back.

Angela M. Rukule, M.S.Ed., M.F.T., is co-executive director and clinical therapist at inneractions in Woodland Hills.