New research published in the journal Nature Medicine illuminates how an artificial intelligence (AI) screening tool can successfully identify hospitalized adults who are at risk for opioid use disorder and alert providers to recommended referral to inpatient addiction specialists. Use of the screening tool reduced hospital readmissions and resulted in health care savings.
The article’s lead author and study principal investigator is ICTR Learning Health System Director Dr. Majid Afshar, an associate professor at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.
Dr. Afshar partnered with ICTR’s Dissemination and Implementation Launchpad and Dr. Felice Resnik, the Launchpad’s lead research scientist, to develop a project study design that used a hybrid effectiveness-implementation framework to plan and deliver the intervention. Use of such a framework increases the likelihood of an intervention’s effectiveness as a scalable, sustainable solution to a critical public health challenge.
Other study authors affiliated with ICTR include Executive Co-director Dr. Beth Burnside and Associate Director of Research Translation and Implementation Dr. Anne Gravel Sullivan.
Funded by National Institutes of Health, the clinical trial found that AI-prompted consultation was equally effective as provider-initiated consultation, ensuring no decrease in quality while offering a more scalable and automated approach.
Learn more
Read about this exciting research in more detail on the website of the UW–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, as well as the website of the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH NIDA) and Wisconsin Public Radio.
This work was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health grants R01-DA051464, R01-LM012973, R01-HL157262 and UL1TR002373.
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