Step 4 Launch
Launch and monitor your new COD pharmacotherapy program.
Launch and monitor your new COD pharmacotherapy program.
Introduction
Your co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders (COD) pharmacotherapy program is almost ready to launch.
Your staff are motivated, educated on the COD-alcohol and/or COD-opioid workflows, and trained to develop any new skills necessary to deliver quality care.
Now is the time to put your plan into action. It may be helpful to create a timeline to help prepare for implementation. You may wish to pilot the program with a small group prior to implementing at a larger scale.
Remember to have clear communication about the timeline of the launch with all individuals who will be affected. This may include organization leaders, frontline leaders, staff who are directly involved in the intervention, patients, support staff, and other units or groups affected by the program. Regular meetings or conference calls may be helpful to share information as new processes are implemented.
Before you formally launch the program, you might want to create a plan to monitor the quality of your COD care program on an ongoing basis.
Ideally, you will create your monitoring plan in advance of implementation. Creating your plan early will allow you time to establish a "baseline" that is based on selected metrics before the program is fully operational so that you can monitor changes over time. You may also want to consult with someone with analytic expertise to help monitor your program metrics.
Quality monitoring is important to determine whether your program works the way it was intended, assess program progress over time, and identify areas that may need attention. Quality monitoring can include metrics that measure program implementation and those that measure client outcomes.
Action Steps
You will want to select metrics that allow you to monitor aspects of the program that are important for your clinic and easily obtainable.
Now that you have determined which metrics will be useful to signal whether your program is successful, create a formal monitoring plan to measure and use those metrics.
If your clinic or organization has a person or team responsible for Quality Assurance or Quality Improvement, this plan may build on their existing processes.
You will want to select metrics that allow you to monitor aspects of the program that are important for your clinic and easily obtainable.
You have now determined that your program has all of the resources and personnel it needs for success, decided when and how to implement the program, and developed a plan to monitor key processes and outcomes to support quality improvement during and after the program is implemented.
Remember, regularly monitoring the program can help point out areas for improvement and highlight program achievements. Conditions in which your site provides COD care will almost certainly change over time. Your monitoring plan will help identify new barriers to program effectiveness. Sticking to your monitoring plan will be important to ensure that you can address barriers as needed.
Your decision to create, launch, and monitor a COD care program at your clinic—and your staff’s dedication to making it a reality—will give patients with co-occurring substance use disorders access to evidence-based treatments and a better chance at recovery.