Knowledge Item: CA-Summary of Patient Outcomes-05
Psychosocial and Medical Outcomes by Drug Abuse Status

Positive Outcomes: Maintained or Enhanced Functioning Over Time During Program
[by Drug Abuse Status]

Notes:

1. Psychosocial Projects did not collect medical indicators.

2. The number of patients in each group varies by outcome and may be quite small in some cases.

3. Symptom severity is considered to be a Psychosocial Outcome because the index of symptom severity is derived from patient self reports.

This Knowledge Item is a direct follow-up to a series of Knowledge Items that use hierarchical linear models to study the degree of change per day in patients (clients) in different kinds of programs. The following table shows the Knowledge Items to which this Knowledge Item is a follow-up.

The hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results presented throughout this Knowledge Base permit an assessment of whether patients change over time on a variety of outcome measures. 

This Knowledge Item follows up on the prior results by examining whether groups of patients, disaggregated by their drug abuse status, have greater than chance levels of improvement. Overall, there is a tendency for individuals known not to abuse drugs to have significant psychosocial and medical outcomes from their participation in the programs. Prior users of drugs tend to have positive outcomes from the programs. It is less clear that the current substance abusers have such positive outcomes, although in many cases the result may be a function of the much smaller sample of current drug abusers going through the programs and staying long enough to be assessed on multiple occasions. Note that this definition of program success means that a patient is either maintained at baseline level or that the scores have an overall (linear) trend toward improvement throughout the entire course of the treatment episode. The parallel Knowledge Item: Summary of Maximum Patient Outcomes-05 uses an alternate definition of patient successful outcomes and suggests approximately the same result.

Positive Outcomes: Maintained or Enhanced Functioning Over Time During Program
[by Drug Abuse Status]

The following chart is another way of looking at the same data presented in the top figure.

Notes:

1. Psychosocial Projects did not collect medical indicators.

2. The number of patients in each group varies by outcome and may be quite small in some cases.

3. Symptom severity is considered to be a Psychosocial Outcome because the index of symptom severity is derived from patient self reports.

Knowledge Item Citation: Huba, G. J., Panter, A. T., Melchior, L. A., and the HRSA/HAB SPNS Cooperative Agreement Steering Committee (1998-2001). Knowledge Item: CA-Summary of Patient Outcomes-05 from HRSA/HAB's SPNS Cooperative Agreements on Innovative Models of Care, The Measurement Group Knowledge Base on HIV/AIDS Care, Online at www.TheMeasurementGroup.com.