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Charles Odell

Hey, everybody. Glad to be with you today. My name is Charles Odell, and this is our chats with Charles Section. Perhaps many of you know me as the chief executive officer and president of Dilworth Center, but I’m also your host for these chats sessions, times when we can provide for you some information that we feel is really important regarding treatment and what we’ve been up to these days.
One of the things that we’ve been doing recently is enhancing our outcomes measurement system. You know, Dilworth Center has always measured outcomes of our treatment experiences here. But what we’ve been doing lately is participating in something that’s really important. You know, I get asked periodically, what’s your success rate in Dilworth Center? And I think that’s a fair question, but it’s a question that’s not always easily answered.
It kind of depends upon how you define success. For example, one way to measure success is to say, okay, one year after somebody finishes treatment, how many people are still clean and sober? One year Post-Discharge And the question is, can you measure that? And the answer is absolutely you can. One of the things that makes what we’re doing now very exciting is that we are now able to take a stronger look at that.
You know, the medical community has always been good at measuring success of various treatment protocols for diseases. For example, if you got diabetes, the doctor would be able to say, look, if you do this, this will be your success rate. This is the outcomes associated with this particular treatment, this type of specific information has unfortunately been historically absent in the field of addictions.
Treatment, and that’s simply because our industry hasn’t done a very good job of measuring this stuff. But what’s beginning to happen is that’s all changing. And I want to use my cheat sheet here so I can get this right. The National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers Dilworth Center is a member of NAATP, and I’m actually on the board of directors.
They have launched something called the Foundation for Recovery, Science and Education. The acronym is FoRSE. Now, this is measuring treatment outcomes across the entire country. Currently, we have 54 treatment centers across 20 states participating in the FoRSE treatment Outcomes Program as data sites. The goal is to have hundreds more all measuring treatment outcomes in a standardized, uniform, and replicable format.
Stumbled over my word there. Dilworth Center, in fact, was the first outpatient center in the country to implement this. This is important. It will standardize the measurement of outcomes across our entire industry. Treatment centers will now be able to compare what they do to other treatment centers and alter their programing in a way that will enhance their treatment programs for their patient population.
The result is that treatment centers can improve and tweak their programing to meet the needs of individuals and their families. And in the end, treatment will improve across the spectrum. More people will get well. I personally see this as one of the most important things going on in our industry right now. And we’ve been here at Dilworth taking care of gathering this information for over a year.
We’re beginning to get some data together, and I look forward to the opportunity to share with you the results of what we’re finding in the future chats. So thanks for joining today. You know, going back to what I said in the beginning, the question, you know, what is your success rate? We are now able to tell you that treatment works and is successful and we can prove it.
It’s great to be with you today. Thanks for tuning in.