Facing Addiction in America: Chapter 6 - Health Care Systems and Substance Use Disorders

Course overview

This chapter describes the key components of health care systems; historical reasons substance use and its consequences have been addressed separately from other health problems; the key role that health care systems can play in providing prevention, treatment, and recovery support services (RSS) for substance use disorders; and the recent developments that are leading to improved integration of substance use-related care with the rest of medicine. This chapter also describes the challenges to effective integration, as well as promising trends, such as in health information technology (health IT) that will facilitate it. Because these changes are still underway, much of the relevant research is still formative and descriptive; information presented in this chapter often derives from reports and descriptive papers.