Revised Criteria Guide Placement Of Patients in Addiction Treatment

In anticipation of an exhaustive overhaul of the widely used American Society of Addiction Medicine’s Patient Placement Criteria for the Treatment of Substance-Related Disorders, ASAM brought together a wide variety of addiction and mental health experts to revise and broaden the popular treatment-planning tool for patients with drug- and alcohol-related problems. The resulting criteria set was released in April after nearly two years of intensive work.

The Patient Placement Criteria Revised-2nd Edition (PPC-2R) now includes criteria for patients with co-occurring mental and substance-related disorders and refines the criteria for adolescents with these disorders. It also provides a wider range of options for detoxification and improved criteria for the management of long-term addiction recovery and opioid maintenance.

Separated into two sets of guidelines, one for adults and one for adolescents, each includes five levels of care, from “Level 0.5: Early Intervention” to “Level IV: Medically Managed Intensive Inpatient Treatment.” Each broad level of service then includes a range of specific levels of care.

Information for each specific level of care was expanded to include brief overviews as well as structured descriptions of the settings, staff, and services and admissions criteria for six dimensions of care, ranging from acute intoxication with withdrawal potential through relapse.

Terminology and classification in the new PPC-2R is consistent with DSM-IV-TR. In addition, the new edition has been reformatted to facilitate comparisons across levels of care.

More information on the ASAM PPC-2R is posted on the Web at www.asam.org/ppc/ppc2.htm. The text is available for $70 for ASAM members and $85 for nonmembers by calling ASAM at (800) 844-8948. ▪