The STop UNhealthy Substance Use Now Trial

Practices will meet with practice facilitators monthly and apply tests of change using a Plan-Do-Study-Act approach, guided by the PF team. Facilitators will confirm that practices have established workflows for substance use disorder (SUD) screening and interventions and perform checks periodically to ensure progression. PF will entail: implementing protocols/algorithms for evidence-based screening and interventions, promoting decision support tools and templates to support practice workflow, optimizing electronic health record (EHR) use to pull clinical data monthly to guide the improvement process, developing patient registries (e.g., for those with SUD) to identify needed care and optimize delivery of evidence-based interventions, encouraging proactive, team-based care with assigned roles and responsibilities, and enhancing the understanding of evidence-based SUD interventions, including counseling and referral resources to ensure practices have appropriate intervention options.

Virtual LC sessions will be held monthly and will include participants presenting anonymized cases to clinical experts, targeted brief didactics related to the content of the cases, and time for open discussion and Q\&A. Participant-generated ideas for topics to be covered during virtual LC sessions will be encouraged. Some specific topics will include optimal SUD screening approaches; prescribing medications for opioid use disorder (OUD) in primary care; pragmatic issues around integrated SUD care within primary care such as compliance with state and federal requirements, note templates/visit frequency, and when/how to escalate care for patients with severe or worsening SUD; medications for alcohol use disorder (AUD); and motivational interviewing.

We will work closely with key stakeholders and the Steering Committee to co-design the PI strategy, refining the specific performance metrics to ensure that they align with other ongoing efforts in our partnering organizations. We plan to base the incentive on achieving a threshold target for the percentage of eligible adult patients screened for SUD, or the percentage improvement in screening, for quarters 1 and 2. For quarters 3 and 4, after practices have had time to implement and improve their processes for screening for SUD, the incentives will evolve to become a composite of (1) patients screened for SUD (the same as used in quarters 1 and 2) and (2) achieving a threshold target for the percentage of persons with SUD who received evidence-based interventions.