D6 - Improving Utilization of Long-acting Medications: Toward Standardized Measures

People living with serious mental illnesses or substance use disorders face considerable barriers to accessing and adhering to effective treatments and those barriers significantly impact clinical outcomes. Robust evidence demonstrates that treatment with long-acting medications (LAMs) substantially reduces treatment nonadherence, dropout, relapse rates, hospitalizations and overall health care costs. Despite this, LAM utilization remains low across health care settings, spotlighting a critical need for standardized, widely adopted measures and benchmarks to enhance the appropriate use of LAMs.

This session will highlight a recent report that addresses the LAM utilization gap. The Medical Director Institute (MDI) of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing brought together experts in psychiatry, addiction medicine and health care quality measurement to develop actionable, standardized measures to drive increased use of LAMs. The panel specifically targeted three domains: psychotic and bipolar disorders, opioid use disorder (OUD) and alcohol use disorder (AUD).