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Heroin Addiction and Related Clinical Problems: 2004, 06, 3 (pages: 5 - 16)

Patient-treatment matching and opioid addicted patients: Past methods and future opportunities

Strain E. C.

Summary: Patient-treatment matching (PTM) is a proactive process in which individual characteristics of a patient are addressed by specific aspects of a treatment modality. While there is considerable interest in PTM for substance abuse disorders, there has been relatively little work showing its efficacy for addictions in general, and virtually no systematic work on PTM for persons with opioid dependence. This paper addresses three assumptions that underlie the idea of PTM: that meaningful subtypes of patients can be reliably identified, that distinguishably different types of treatment are available, and that those treatments can be provided reliably. Different approaches that are relevant to studying PTM are then briefly reviewed: the Addiction Severity Index, the Transtheoretical Model of Behaviour Change, the subtyping of patients, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine's Patient Placement Criteria. The paper concludes by outlining possible future directions for research on PTM, especially with respect to opioid dependence.