Author
Listed:
- Sheffet, Amiram M.
- Kakumanu, Prasadarao V.
- Lavenhar, Marvin A.
- Feuerman, Martin
Abstract
While generally justifying the large amount of money invested in the treatment effort, evaluation studies of treatment centers for drug addiction do not offer a rational method of allocating scarce resources among the various available treatment programs. The problem is further confounded by different costs associated with the different programs and also because clients rarely complete the prescribed treatment. We developed functional relationships between treatment outcomes and time in treatment that allow the inclusion of probable length of stay of patients and cost per week for a particular treatment program in the evaluation considerations. The model evolved from a drug addiction treatment system operating in Newark, New Jersey consisting of six different treatment centres. Treatment outcome measures are derived from a psychosocial questionnaire which was administered to patients at appropriate time intervals. The questionnaire probed into the important facets of human behavior as related to the use or non-use of drugs for non-medical reasons. Gompertz curves reflecting treatment benefit are computed for each treatment center by least square fit of the collected data to appropriate differential equations and used together with cost of treatment retention rates to compute expected net benefit for each treatment center. These enable the researcher to find the treatment centers with the best treatment outcome or alternately with the best expected cost benefit ratio for any patient type.
Suggested Citation
Sheffet, Amiram M. & Kakumanu, Prasadarao V. & Lavenhar, Marvin A. & Feuerman, Martin, 1982.
"Treatment benefit functions for a drug abuse rehabilitation treatment system,"
Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 16(24), pages 2109-2116, January.
Handle:
RePEc:eee:socmed:v:16:y:1982:i:24:p:2109-2116
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:16:y:1982:i:24:p:2109-2116. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.