A Comparison of Strategies for Retention and Re-engagement for Medication Assisted Treatment Patients

Date of Award

Fall 2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Healthcare Administration (DHA)

Committee Chair

Crissie Jameson

Committee Member

David Meckstroth

Committee Member

Jesse Florang

Abstract

The problem associated with Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) programs is the high rate of broken appointments for patients enrolled in and receiving treatment. Broken appointments have continued to be an issue in MAT programs which can impact the overall effectiveness of programs. Improving a patient’s treatment appointment compliance in treatment (MAT) programs has been an ongoing investigation phenomenon. Introducing interventions with pre-appointment reminders has been the focus of many researchers, however investigating the impact of a re-engagement intervention for those patients that have already missed an appointment has not been completed. This research study presented an alternative approach to addressing the issue of treatment compliance through post-broken-appointment re-engagement efforts. More specifically, this investigation compared the impact of an already established retention strategy to a new re-engagement strategy across two groups of patients in terms of impact on overall treatment compliance and satisfaction with communication specific to scheduling. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether a new re-engagement strategy (vs. the old retention strategy) influenced the rate of compliance for attended appointments for 114 patients receiving the same MAT appointment frequency, relative to a standard retention strategy. Furthermore, the current study examined the relationship between patient satisfaction and communication specific to scheduling/arranging appointments.

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