Addiction treatment and research coalesce under one roof

When the Wellbridge residential treatment center opens next year on Long Island, clinicians will be able to work in tandem with on-site researchers to improve patient outcomes. The goal is to create an addiction treatment learning laboratory, according to parent company Northwell Health.

“Care is increasingly being driven by data, and the addiction field is behind the curve relative to other specialties,” says Jonathan Morgenstern, PhD, assistant vice president of substance abuse services at Northwell. “Obviously the human touch can’t be replaced, but we think having data, collecting data and analyzing it in a way that will be actionable will help more patients.”

As researchers observe treatment outcomes and analyze patterns, they will seek to discover which interventions work best and for whom. Once best practices along the continuum are identified, clinicians can integrate them into everyday clinical care at Wellbridge.

“We’ll be able to see if outcomes improve as we modify our treatment, and that’s a huge step forward for our field,” Morgenstern says.

Typically, he says, it takes a decade or more for cutting-edge clinical intelligence to reach the front lines of care delivery. Wellbridge aims to speed up the process and make continuous quality improvement a mainstay in the field of addiction treatment.

The $95 million, 80-bed facility is scheduled to open in late 2019 on a 40-acre campus just three miles away from one of Northwell’s New York teaching hospitals. Studies at Wellbridge will be supported by external grants as well as internal funding sources and philanthropy. Local academic resources and two of the organization’s psychiatric facilities will contribute to the knowledge base.

Patient participation

A team of 50 clinicians and researchers will conduct studies focused on some of the more promising avenues, such as imaging, neuroscience, precision medicine and comparative effectiveness. For example, genetic biomarkers can inform the use of medications, but mapping genetic profiles directly to optimal addiction treatment is still down the road, Morgenstern says.

“There are huge differences in how patients respond to treatment, and we’d like to see if we can identify more precise markers to tell us how a certain patient responds to a certain treatment,” he says.

Morgenstern believes Northwell’s integrated model of care—for medical/surgical and behavioral health—will provide an advantage for its addiction research and the implementation of best practices.

In terms of scale, the research will include cohorts of several hundred patients, comparable to large national studies, Morgenstern says. Patients must provide explicit consent to participate in the research and will be able to opt out at any time.

“The process is to engage them as participants in the knowledge community so they can help themselves and create knowledge for others,” he says.

Wellbridge will track patients’ recovery for a number of years, leveraging its established research models for following those with other chronic conditions. In fact, some of the future studies will examine better ways to keep in touch with patients over time.

Technology tools

“Connected health” is a key area of study for all of healthcare, Morgenstern says. In today’s digital age, technology and healthcare are intersecting to promote better management of chronic conditions, and many of the techniques found effective for diabetes, for example, can be applied to addiction care.

“For all these conditions, we want an activated patient who knows they need to take personal responsibly for their health,” he says.