Background: Authorities recommend universal substance use screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) for all (ie, universal) adult primary care patients.
Objective: The objective of this study was to examine long-term (24-mo) changes in health care utilization and costs associated with receipt of universal substance use SBIRT implemented by paraprofessionals in primary care settings.
Research design: This study used a difference-in-differences design and Medicaid administrative data to assess changes in health care use among Medicaid beneficiaries receiving SBIRT. The difference-in-differences estimates were used in a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate potential cost-offsets associated with SBIRT.
Subjects: The treatment patients were Medicaid beneficiaries who completed a 4-question substance use screen as part of an SBIRT demonstration program between 2006 and 2011. Comparison Medicaid patients were randomly selected from matched clinics in Wisconsin.
Measures: The study includes 4 health care utilization measures: outpatient days; inpatient length of stay; inpatient admissions; and emergency department admissions. Each outcome was assigned a unit cost based on mean Wisconsin Medicaid fee-for-service reimbursement amounts.
Results: We found an annual increase of 1.68 outpatient days (P=0.027) and a nonsignificant annual decrease in inpatient days of 0.67 days (P=0.087) associated with SBIRT. The estimates indicate that the cost of a universal SBIRT program could be offset by reductions in inpatient utilization with an annual net cost savings of $782 per patient.
Conclusions: Paraprofessional-delivered universal SBIRT is likely to yield health care cost savings and is a cost-effective mechanism for integrating behavioral health services in primary care settings.